Blog Post by Contributing Authors: Ronda Harris & Tara Roberson-Moore
In college, I had an English professor that taught us that if you use a new word three times then you will remember it. That tactic is more important than ever to help today’s workforce truly understand and retain learning. The world is ever-changing, and that is now accelerated because of the rapid advancements of technology enabling virtual collaboration across the globe. As screen-time increases, research shows a decrease in attention span. This, coupled with increasing demands for companies to scale and often accomplish more with less, has presented some new and unique challenges for employee learning.
Microlearning is a great solution for these challenges. Microlearning provides smaller segments of content that effectively enable the acquisition of knowledge and skills. These segments, sometimes called “chunks”, “nuggets”, or “bursts”, are delivered in a variety of formats, including explainer videos, readings, software simulations, interactive PDFs, podcasts, or short mobile learning resources.
It’s instruction that occurs in a short easily digestible format.
One of the main benefits of microlearning is “chunking” of content. This promotes a higher level of retention through repetition while also addressing the need to cater to learners’ diminishing attention spans.
Another benefit of microlearning is implementation flexibility. While traditional learning strategies can be costly and time-consuming to create, microlearning is created using various tools that don’t necessarily require special skills or the use of a learning management system.
This flexibility makes it much easier to create, update, and maintain “microlessons”. There are also a variety of templates available that allow you to simply upload content and present it in a multitude of ways. This makes it easier to update content when changes occur and can make lifecycle maintenance easier as well. This provides the most current information available faster.
This is not necessarily a new form of learning in our everyday lives. Have you ever looked up how to do something on YouTube? Have you Googled an answer? These are forms of microlearning. Transferring that to the workplace means businesses interested in employee performance and ensuring a solid understanding of company policies and procedures can do so with customizable content delivered via microlearning.
In their research, Mohammed,G.S., Wakil,K. & Nawroly,S.S. (2018) concluded that, “using [the] microlearning method can improve students’ learning ability up to 18% compared to [a] traditional method. Furthermore, the study seems to prove that students are able to retain information effectively and [that] microteaching aids their long-term memory.”
When analyzing the need for investing in workforce education, microlearning is an approach well worth giving serious consideration. Remember to use the term, microlearning, three times today!
