Delivering Bite-sized eCourses on Personalized Mobile Devices: Emerging Role of Microlearning for Modern Corporates

Today, the role of learning and development professionals is significantly impacted by emerging technology and trends. It is very evident from the shift towards a more interactive, personalized, and easily consumed e-learning type: microlearning. As the new-age workforce is mostly on the go, it is essential to create bite-sized eCourses to enable learning anytime and anywhere. Microlearning is a viable solution for modern training landscape as it caters to the pertinent needs of diversified audiences.

Effectiveness of Microlearning: Benefits at a Glance

Organizations from diverse industry verticals face the challenge to train their workforce adequately. Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, transform everyone’s lives by unleashing new ways of learning. Microlearning is a pull-based approach which motivates learners to access personalized eLearning courses at the point of need. It helps to bridge skills-gaps, boost engagement, knowledge retention, and overall business efficiency. Several benefits of microlearning include the following:

1- Better retention

When bite-sized eCourses are delivered at regular intervals of time, it leads to better learner engagement and knowledge retention. For instance, if a learner wants to access the same online learning courses over repeated intervals, then short content chunks reinforce the learning experience. So, learners watching a short video may engage more or retain for long rather than reading textual information.

2- Continuous learning

Microlearning serves as a successful approach when it comes to delivering continuous learning. On average, people forget about 60-70% information they seek and continue to forget as time passes. It is a big challenge for industries where safety and compliance play a significant role. Microlearning is a continuous learning approach to deliver eCourses at spaced intervals, thereby improving retention over a short period.

3- Just-in-time approach

Microlearning is a whenever-you-can learning approach suitable for on the go training environment. When micro-content is delivered at short spans, training becomes useful for both organizations as well as learners. So, just-in-time learning encourages the workforce to access quick to consume bite-sized modules at their own pace of time and convenience. Microlearning helps to break lengthy training sessions into easy to access mini-courses. Consequently, this enables learners to access relevant modules without any need to complete the whole course at a time.

4- Soft skills training

Microlearning focuses on delivering short duration eCourses on specific topics. It aids the workforce to acquire soft skills such as leadership development, teamwork, communication, and others. The bite-sized content based on these subjects serves as an effective way to bridge skills-gaps and boost knowledge competency.

Companies across the globe adopt a microlearning approach for an effective corporate training experience. Several reasons include:

• Micro-content delivery is a time-saving approach as it helps to increase ROIs and cut down training costs through content repurposing.
• With less time associated with the delivery of the same kind of content at repeated intervals, microlearning removes the time constraints.
• As the millennial workforce has short attention spans, they prefer accessing short bursts of information on their personalized mobile devices to learn anytime and anywhere.

Microlearning is an engaging training approach that supports both formal and informal training. It delivers in 2-5 minutes shorter nuggets in the form of infographics, videos, games, podcasts, and more. As a result, this boosts overall retention levels, business performance, ROIs, learner engagement, and business growth.