6 Tips to Infuse Your Enterprise Learning Curriculum with the Power of Microlearning
Microlearning is more than just a professional learning buzzword. Of course, microlearning is getting a lot of attention right now in the growing space around diverse learning ecosystems and new emerging technologies used to deliver content to learners quickly and easily. Separating the hype from the value is tough in some cases, and this is no exception. Microlearning’s real focus is centered around the art of distilling complex subjects down into digestible, bite-sized nuggets of information — and it’s an incredibly useful way to help employees find answers to questions that arise in the flow of work.
That said, creating microcontent to foster microlearning doesn’t come naturally for many instructional designers. Traditional professional learning methodologies can be summed up with a snappy modern acronym: TL; DR (too long; didn’t read). That’s because instructional designers are often conditioned to create the equivalent of the Encyclopedia Britannica for every conceivable topic employees might need to learn about. Training has long been seen as an event, not a process or a journey. Therefore, when training is created and delivered, often organizations default to pushing too much information to learners in order to avoid something crucial being missed.
In sharp contrast, good microlearning parses lengthy tomes into useful snippets. Instead of providing the proverbial 26 volumes of exhaustive encyclopedic information, the focused microcopy in well-designed micro-learning narrows the material down to its bare minimums — possibly down to one page or even one paragraph.
Encyclopedic content isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. It’s great to have a wealth of information available for in-depth research and study. Some fields absolutely need practitioners to have deep expertise in the subject area. This is gained through experience on the job, but also through recurring and valuable professional development (read: training). However, with the shifting climate of the mobile and remote, and hybrid workforce, to effectively support modern, on-the-go learners, you need to add the potent tool of microlearning to your instructional design toolbox.
Follow these 6 tips (or 10 Rs if you enjoy mnemonic alliteration as much as we do) to give your employees the succinct, just-in-time support they crave.
1. Reach for the Right Tools to Author and Deliver Microlearning
This basic concept is true in so many areas of life. Using the right tools at the right time in the right way makes all the difference in whether you achieve the result you’re looking for. You wouldn’t use a hammer on a pushpin when your thumb can do the job. That would be overkill. In the same way, you shouldn’t reach for a limitless tool like Microsoft PowerPoint when creating microlearning. You’ll be tempted to create way more content than you should. Instead, choose an authoring tool that forces you to hone in on a singular objective.
Many mobile-first authoring tools have maximum word counts or video lengths built-in, so you can’t easily exceed those pre-set limits. Live previews to show you just how much content you are trying to push out to your learners will help you empathize with them. Follow the previews and tips provided. These microlearning templates help you master the art of being succinct and to the point.
Of course, authoring microcontent is only the first step. In order for it to matter, you also need to deliver it in a way that is intuitive, user-friendly, and accessible. Your traditional Learning Management System (LMS) is likely not well-suited for short-form content delivery. It’s too bulky, multi-faceted, and comprehensive for microlearning. It's focused on sitting down, using the longer form content, and being assessed on your understanding of that content. What you need instead is an agile learning experience platform (LXP) that makes it easy for learners to access the material that is relevant to them. Further, an LXP favors content reuse and leveraging those assets as a reference.
2. Exercise Restraint When Developing Microcontent
When you begin creating microlearning resources, you’ll need to fight hard against your natural tendency to disgorge large amounts of content. Choosing the right authoring tool will help you here — but it’s still important to shift your mindset and learn how to exercise restraint as a matter of course.
This goes against what you’ve been programmed to do. If you’ve been responsible for creating traditional professional learning coursework, you’ve likely done so in terms of filling up a certain number of hours or even days. This is especially true if you support workers who are required to earn Continuing Education Credits (CEUs). Therefore, it’s common to approach microlearning purely in terms of length, too. However, “how long should my piece of microcontent be?” is ultimately the wrong question.
Microlearning isn’t just about length. It’s about delivering a targeted piece of content to meet a specific knowledge gap. Yes, it could be consumed in five minutes or less. However, if it doesn’t meet your learner’s needs, length ultimately doesn’t matter. What you should focus on is providing the best quality information in the smallest quantity possible.
To accomplish this, identify one learning objective for each piece of microlearning. Keep things tight, focused and skip the history lessons.
3. Reduce Content Down to a Singular Learning Objective
Microlearning requires you to narrow your focus down to one key takeaway. For example, if we wanted to create microlearning from this blog post, we wouldn’t try to cram all ten R’s into one module. Instead, we’d highlight one. The more granular you can get with a piece of microcontent, the better.
If you notice your content is starting to become unwieldy or feel like it’s becoming difficult to fit everything in that you’d like to say, it’s time to cut. You don’t need to tell your learners everything. Sometimes, what you don’t tell them is just as important as what you do.
It’s also important to keep each discrete module homogenous in terms of the format. If you’re creating written content, don’t try to jazz it up with videos or other forms of rich media. Your granularity of focus applies to the content itself and to the modality in which you choose to present that content. This helps improve search optimization and filtering when your learners are browsing through content recommendations or searching for help on a particular question. This granularization helps with your content strategy from a long term perspective as well, since it should force you to consider how to categorize, tag, and store the content for later retrieval.
4. Encourage Employees to Ruminate About the Topics that Matter to Them
Although you are exercising restraint and reducing your focus when creating microlearning, your ultimate goal as an instructional designer is still to educate and train your workforce. The best way to do this is to spark their curiosity. Tantalize them with the joy of discovery, make things self-evident and satisfying on the surface, but provide just enough intrigue so that if they want to learn more, they can.
Use tools such as reminders, notifications, and AI-powered recommendation engines to invite your learners to ruminate and reflect more deeply on what they’ve learned. After all, your microlearning module exists within a robust learning ecosystem. You can always create another piece of content to cover the other points you want to address. Link to those and add them to your users’ “Recommended Reading” section. This allows you to round out your topic and put it in context while inviting learners to explore the material that’s most salient for their roles and responsibilities. We've mentioned Mosher and Gottfredson's Five Moments of Need here in the blog before. This is the "More" moment. Use it. It's powerful.
5. Make Wise Use of Repetition to Improve Learners’ Retention
From the fabled, seemingly ancient Hermann Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve theory to the fun, more modern read of Dr. John Medina’s Brain Rules, there is a wealth of research on how humans absorb, remember, and forget information. The bottom line is that repetition is the key to retention. The more learners interact and engage with content, the more likely they are to remember it next week, next month, and next year.
Therefore, invite users to revisit and reuse microcontent frequently. Microlearning is inherently a performance support and knowledge refresher tool. It’s normal for learners not to retain all the material you offer them. Embrace glanceability and scannability so your employees can easily review what they’ve forgotten and reinforce those items in their memory.
6. Keep Refining as You Learn What Resonates With Your Learners
Your first foray into creating microlearning won’t be perfect — and that’s ok. It takes practice and experimentation to see what works and what you need to tweak. To help you refine your microlearning approach, gather user feedback, and dig into data analytics. Look at things like:
Do employees access content regularly, ideally every day?
What resources do your learners view most frequently? Which ones do they revisit time and again?
Are learners able to accelerate their learning based on experience level?
Where do users tend to drop off and disengage?
Are there common keywords and search phrases that indicate a need you’re not meeting?
The granular content creation, publication, and delivery strategies have to go along with the granular data acquisition and analysis strategies. That's where modern specifications like xAPI come into play. Use this big data approach to find out what's best for your audience and tune it.
There will always be new ways to develop and adapt content for your learners’ evolving needs — so commit to continuous improvement. Never stop refining as you seek to create frictionless pathways to the content that will best serve your learners.
Microlearning is Here to Stay
Buzzwords come and go, but the principles behind microlearning are here to stay. It may be called something different in the future — but in our modern, fast-paced, mobile-first world, the need for searchable, accessible, focused content will only increase. Therefore, it’s time to flex a new instructional design muscle. Harness the power of microlearning to give your learners what they need to thrive.
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