What does an eLearning microlearning course look like? How beneficial is it? What steps do you need to take to create your eLearning microlearning courses? How long should a microlearning unit last? In the current article, we will explore the answers to these questions.
What is microlearning?
Consider this: When you’re looking for the solution to a problem, you’re looking for information that will quickly solve that problem. But what if you don’t find the answer right away? Logically, you will look for it in a next source, ignoring the one that cannot give you an immediate solution to your problem.
This is where microlearning comes in to help us. This article will look at microlearning, its advantages, and how you can create your training programs and eLearning courses using this technique.
Let’s first clarify what microlearning is.
Microlearning is a way of delivering content broken into short individual learning units, each of which has its own learning/training objective.
Microlearning promotes the design of learning and training programs, aiming to respond quickly to students’ potential questions. Practically through microlearning, instructional designers focus on transmitting pieces of knowledge, which are written in an easy to understand way so that, on the one hand, they are easily absorbed by the student and, on the other hand, those pieces of knowledge can cover a specific knowledge gap.
In essence, it helps the learner quickly locate information to fill a specific knowledge gap.
How effective is microlearning?
But why is it so effective as a learning technique? Let us take two cases of students. Professionals and younger people belonging to GenZ.
Let’s start with the professionals. The average person devotes only 1% of his available time to training in their respective field of work. With so little time available, it is pointless to expect such a person to devote much time to an extensive training programme.
On the other hand, there’s the new generation of people, specifically GenZ. With an attention span of 8 seconds, it is utopian to expect that the GenZ will sit passively and attend a lengthy training program.
Therefore, in both situations, a microlearning approach can only be beneficial since this approach views the learning audience’s time (or the lack of it) highly.
Steps for designing eLearning that follows a microlearning approach
To develop your own microlearning experiences, you need to take a series of actions that extend from the design of the training/education program to its implementation.
Step 1 - Define your audience
You must first clearly define your audience. Training with a loosely defined audience or training that tries to address multiple audiences’ needs will result in failure. Narrow a loosely defined audience to the specific people the training aims to help. This way, you will create content that is relevant to the learners.
Since microlearning emphasises filling a knowledge gap quickly, it is necessary to remove from your content anything that is not absolutely necessary to fill that gap.
What should you do?
When analysing the content, remove all extraneous information that is not necessary to fill the knowledge gap. The microlearning approach emphasises discarding the "useful" information and keeping what's essential for the learner.
Step 2 - Break the training program into short learning units
Then you have to break any extensive training into smaller units of short duration.
Long courses lead to cognitive overload. Microlearning opposes this practice. Each module should present a specific, different piece of knowledge. Thus, each includes information that answers the learner’s question, “What’s in for me?”, thus resulting in its small size.
What should you do?
Divide the training program into units so that each unit covers a small and specific knowledge/skills gap of the learner.
Hint
Make sure each respective unit can give a specific answer to the learner's question, "What's in for me?".
Step 3 - Create self-contained learning units
Each unit should be accessible and comprehensible without visiting the previous ones first in order to meet a specific learning need or gap. Every unit should contain different information, independent of the other units.
What should you do?
Create activities that complement only a single learning unit. Do not create activities that require the learner to complete other units first.
Step 4 - The structure of the training program
Choose a simple, logical structure for your content. Yes, each unit should be able to stand alone. But, If the units are combined in a sequence, they should form an overall training program, giving depth to the learning experience.
Example
Think of Duolingo. Duolingo offers stand-alone learning opportunities that last for less than a few minutes. Yet if these learning opportunities are combined, they last for hundreds of hours, forming a complete learning experience.
What should you do?
Re-read the training program’s outline or give it to a colleague for review. Ask them or yourself if the flow of information looks sensible.
Step 5 - Give each learning unit a self-explanatory title
By reading a unit’s title, the learner should easily understand its contents. This way, you make sure that the information the learner is looking for can be easily located and accessed. It’s better to avoid really long titles. Keep it short, but ensure that the shorter version answers the ‘What’s in for me question’. Otherwise, a longer title is acceptable.
Example
‘Boundary Management’ can be changed to ‘Setting boundaries between personal and professional life.’ The initial title, although it was short, didn’t define what the unit was about.
What should you do?
Structure the unit's title in a way that answers the learner’s question, “What’s in for me?”.
How long should a microlearning unit last?
The ideal duration of a unit is about 5-8 minutes. However, according to Kate Udalova, founder of the rapid authoring tool 7taps, units in a microlearning training program should not last longer than 10 minutes. This way, students will not lose interest in learning and will waste less time on training, allowing more time for practice.
Bottom line
It should be emphasised that microlearning is not a solution that-fits-all. In cases where the training audience lacks some rudimentary knowledge of the content, a thorough presentation of the information is usually preferable. Therefore, if you aim to create training programs in which, according to the audience analysis, you have determined that the students do not have prior knowledge, it is better to choose a classic, more detailed approach to present the content.