Employees require skill development, but may lack the time or focus for lengthy training materials. Microlearning helps employees stay engaged while improving learning outcomes.
An LMS allows you to quickly create and share bite-sized courses that your employees can access anytime, anywhere – its features including gamification elements, mobile optimization and analytics dashboard.
Mini-Course Format
Mini courses are short courses designed to introduce learners to a single topic or subject area, provide an overview or offer insights. Furthermore, mini courses can also serve as growth marketing tools that attract new students to your online course or website.
Mini-courses can take many forms, from email courses and e-books to blog posts or social media updates repurposed as course modules. Mini-courses offer creators an excellent way of testing out course development without investing months of development work in full courses.
Selecting topics for mini-courses requires careful thought to ensure they combine your expertise with what your audience craves. Furthermore, creating mini-courses allows you to test out ideas with real world results before investing time and money on creating full length courses.
Video can be an engaging, educational, and concise means of delivering mini-courses, so the quality of your videos should not only enhance their learning experience for viewers but also foster engagement from them. Ensure they provide engaging, educational content.
Integrating quizzes into mini-courses is a great way to engage learners and ensure retention. LearnDash offers an excellent quiz builder that makes creating quizzes a snap, as well as including feedback sections in mini-courses as an excellent way to gather insight about learners’ experiences with your content.
Mini-course length is entirely up to you, though two hours is typically ideal to help learners retain what they’ve learned and prevent information overload. At the conclusion of each mini-course, recommend next steps for your audience as this can add value and encourage action that come out of what they learned – not only can this increase engagement and engagement rates overall but it can also enhance user experiences!
Gamification
When it comes to providing information, our brains tend to process smaller chunks better. A microlearning platform with gamification features is an effective way of offering your learners shorter bursts that are easier for them to consume and apply, encouraging repeat use and increasing engagement with content.
Gamification is the practice of adding elements of game design to non-gaming experiences in order to increase user engagement, increase learning retention, and enhance performance. This can be accomplished using different approaches such as leaderboards, badges, contests or opportunities to “level up”. When applied in learning contexts this form of gamification helps engage employees with content more quickly so that more modules will be completed successfully.
Microlearning platforms often allow learners to access training through various formats like videos and infographics in addition to gamification. This provides learners with an accessible learning experience tailored specifically for them; especially useful when training frontline workers who may already be comfortable using mobile devices.
Utilizing video in training can make content more relevant to employees and more engaging to watch, as well as an excellent way of explaining complex topics or explaining hard-to-grasp concepts. Video has even been shown to increase learner engagement by up to 300%!
Microlearning platforms may include videos as part of their course modules or provide access to an extensive library of video content; this could be beneficial if your company already has video libraries that you would like to incorporate into its microlearning courses.
Certain microlearning platforms feature mobile apps that enable learners to quickly access content on their smartphones or tablets, giving learners instantaneous access to training that allows them to return to work immediately after viewing it. This can be an ideal way of providing employees with timely content access at the point of need while eliminating login screens for convenient training on-the-go.
Contextualized Learning
For learners to effectively absorb and retain information, it must be delivered in small pieces and repeated frequently. Furthermore, learners should have opportunities to practice what they have learned so that it sticks in their memory more readily – all techniques associated with microlearning learning model.
To meet these challenges, innovative education methods have emerged which are more effective than traditional eLearning. Microlearning provides knowledge in short, tightly focused bursts that are optimized for mobile devices and deliver quick results. To make use of this new technique, organizations must select a training platform tailored specifically to their needs.
Microlearning platforms that deliver content quickly to mobile devices while supporting the goals of an organization’s wider training program can accelerate employee training by up to 300%.
ADP is one of several large enterprises using microlearning to deliver customized product training to its global workforce. Due to fast-paced business demands, ADP required a training solution tailored specifically for each learner – prompting it to implement microlearning with courses, demos and videos.
OttoLearn is another microlearning platform designed to increase knowledge retention through various means such as gamification and spaced repetition. OttoLearn also features a mobile learning app, providing learners with two-minute micro-lessons featuring customizable leaderboards and contests.
Microlearning also uses training simulations, providing employees with hands-on experience of their job duties. Companies like Designing Digitally create customized 2D or full 3D virtual reality simulation experiences tailored specifically to employees’ individual needs – ideal for microlearning in small environments like call centers.
An effective microlearning platform begins with an in-depth evaluation of company needs and content creation requirements, along with cost considerations. Following that analysis, identify a platform which meets those criteria while being adaptable enough to accommodate future growth of your organization.
Mobile Learning
Given the rise of mobile devices for work, it is increasingly essential to give employees access to learning anywhere at any time. Mobile learning takes many forms: standalone lessons delivered directly to smartphones or tablets; mobile-friendly eLearning modules featuring videos, interactive elements and/or gamification; or both. Not only can mLearning give learners access to learning materials on their own terms, but it can also give them more independence in the learning process. For instance, if an employee has questions related to their duties that were not answered in the onboarding content, they may seek additional resources like an FAQ section online or contact one of the customer support team members directly for more assistance.
Microlearning development times are considerably faster than those for traditional eLearning courses, since microlearning content development allows organizations to concentrate more closely on delivering one objective at a time rather than weaving multiple topics together into an extended course. This helps organizations deliver training content more rapidly while cutting costs and time to market.
Today’s employees are busy and strapped for time, yet still want to learn and advance in their careers. Therefore, training needs to fit with their busy lives and short attention spans; thus microlearning has become so popular; offering bite-sized knowledge that’s easily digested gives employees the chance to grow without disrupting daily lives.
Organizations have increasingly turned to microlearning platforms for their L&D needs, whether that means training new hires or updating existing knowledge – these tools are tailored specifically to fit into busy schedules while supporting long-term learning outcomes.
Microlearning platforms that excel should offer various features that cater to differing learning preferences, from compatibility with all popular mobile devices and an emphasis on simplicity, clarity, interactivity and visual appeal to flexible pricing plans that cater to the needs of different audiences – including free plans as well as paid subscription plans that include customer support capabilities as well as community building capabilities.
