Education 2.0 & 3.0

MicroLearning is a form of learning that delivers key concepts in as short an amount of time as possible. It is a short, sharp, just-in-time snippet. I like to think of microLearning as 'short enough to watch standing up on the job'. It's when you need a quick tip, brush up on a specific skill or have a moment to learn about new product between customers.

What are the 5 advantages of microLearning?

The greatest advantage of microLearning is time. Imagine a manager racing through their day. They have a performance management meeting with an employee but have not had the time to read up on the correct procedure to follow. Or a railway engineer arriving at a broken down train and the broken axle is something he hasn't unbolted for 12 months. Neither of them have the time to scroll through three layers on the company's Intranet, find the LMS, log on and watch the 20-minute module. 

What they want is to go to their phone, open an App, and BAM! There is the 3-minute microLearning video. It's all about timely learning.

One of our clients is a global Japanese car manufacturer. They require an eLearning module for every new model released. They don't have months to plan for product training. They need learning NOW! What companies require is microLearning with rapid development that matches their timeline for product delivery.

Learning's expiry date is faster than ever. It used to be that a learning program would last a few years before it needs refreshing but with changing products, people and systems, learning is being discarded faster and needs to be produced cheaply, yet with quality. MicroLearning is a cost effective and fast way to develop training content, making it a win/win for the companies and the learners.

Around 70% of millennials visit YouTube monthly. It is a large part of their life so it seems obvious that we should adapt learning to what they are familiar with. When millennials need to learn something, they watch a 2 minute YouTube video.

Research teaches us that if you hear something, after 3 days, you would have only retained 10% of what you learnt. If you then add a picture to that, retention increases to 65% - that's 6 times better! Using video in MicroLearning makes it stick. Our brain links what we hear to a picture and retention is greater.

One of our Pharma clients is investing in Asia. The people they are training in Asia have limited access to computers, but they all have smartphones. How do they train them? MicroLearning. They make it engaging, enjoyable, entertaining and most of all mobile compatible. The training is mobile, so that they can watch it standing up on the job, or sitting on the bus or train.

MicroLearning is certainly leading the way in creating new and exciting learning content, whilst making the process easier for both the companies and their employees. Send me a message if you'd like to find out more on our microLearning offering and what we can offer.

Chris Gaborit is managing director of The Learning Factor, an eLearning company who loves technology linked to learning. Follow him here on Linkedin, on Twitter @droneservicesAU and Instagram @idronefoto

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"Organizations that send people out for training really need to have some type of a plan from beginning to end," says David Lewis, president and CEO of OperationsInc., a human resources consulting firm. And if your organization isn’t providing such a framework, it’s up to you to do so, so that you can not only prove that it was worthwhile, but also to open the door for future training.

Here is what you should be doing before, during, and after to maximize the return on investment.

When we find our work meaningful and worthwhile, we are more likely to enjoy it, to be more productive, and feel committed to our employers and satisfied with our jobs. For obvious reasons, then, work psychologists have been trying to find out what factors contribute to people finding more meaning in their work.

Top of the list is what they call “task significance”, which in plain English means believing that the work you do is of benefit to others. However, to date, most of the evidence for the importance of task significance has been correlational – workers who see how their work is beneficial to others are more likely to find it meaningful, but that doesn’t mean that task significance is causing the feelings of meaningfulness.

Now Blake Allan at Purdue University has provided some of the first longitudinal evidence that seeing our work as benefiting others really does lead to an increase in our finding it meaningful. “These results are important both for the wellbeing of individual workers and as a potential avenue to increase productivity,” he concludes in the Journal of Vocational Behaviour.