Rachel Horwitz’s Post

The future of learning is short…… Many of you have only read my work online. Many of you do not know that I am a very small statured woman. My two boys, one almost 13, is taller than me, and my other son, who is 9, is almost as tall as me. So that gives you an idea of where I stand (no pun intended) in the height situation. The good news is that both my passion, learning, and my height, short, have now come together in the world of learning and development. By now you’ve probably seen and heard about bite-sized learning, microlearning, nudges, questions, texts. You name it, it’s all about brevity and gaining someone’s attention in under 5 minutes. In my company, we are testing the limits of gamification, microlearning, nudges and short bursts of learning using 3-5 questions a day and playing games. Actual learning takes….5 minutes a day! My day typically looks like this. I get up, get ready for work, have my coffee, take out my phone, play a quick game of color crush, answer 3-5 questions, and get on with my day. And guess what? I have learned a lot in the past 4 months. After about one month of 3-5 minutes a day of learning, and playing a few games I guarantee to you that I have learned a lot. The concept of 3-5 minutes a day answering 3-5 questions is about learning reinforcement.  I engage my brain to answer questions about content which I’ve already been exposed to and this helps me remember what I may have been taught in a classroom, or e-learning or microlearning. Without getting too technical, brain science has proved that when you engage your brain to relax, as in playing a game, then you ask your brain to think, by answering questions, new neural connections are made. Here is an actual example of how we have done this at work. We created a microlearning about prioritization and time management, which is something we all most likely need to improve upon. The daily 3-5 questions focused on the prioritization matrix and we reinforced learnings with additional questions about tasks that are urgent and important. Shortly after launch, I found my colleagues discussing their priorities in terms of level of urgency and level of importance. We started to think through our work in terms of what we could delegate, delete and complete by ourselves or others. Then we celebrated. It worked! This is an example of not only learning the content, but even changing our behavior as a result. This proved to me that daily learning reinforcement in short, bite-sized bursts works. Now I’m taking my step stool and my short learning everywhere I go and as I work with my stakeholders and SMEs we are designing and developing learning in this manner. I challenge you to try it, and in short….it works. #learning #future #microlearning