Today, most organizations face various challenges in training and developing their new-age workforce. Mobile devices such as smartphones have transformed our lives by exploring new ways of learning things. These have helped the organizations to unleash new ideas and expand their business. As mobile learning helps to manage and bridge the skills gaps, the concept of delivering small bursts of information has also generated more buzz than the others. Learning & Development professionals choose microlearning as an effective approach to close these gaps within the organization. Certainly, short and crisp learning modules are better at engaging employees within a limited timeframe. Microlearning is based on a ‘pull’ approach where learners are encouraged to assess their individual learning needs and undergo training as per those needs. This not only motivates learners to invest more in learning, but also provides them with an opportunity to undergo training exactly when needed.
Creating Different Microlearning Formats Micro content can exist in different formats which are easier to understand and quick to digest. Some of these micro content forms include infographics, videos, quizzes, games, live presentations and more. While designing and developing bite-sized learning modules, the following tips should be followed by the organizations:
- Disintegrate training content into shorter duration modules which are less than 10 minutes of duration. This helps to improve employee retention and understanding of content by keeping their focus on a particular topic.
- Embed real-life examples that the learners can relate to. This will increase their inquisitiveness and get them spare some time, thinking about the topic. As a result, this aids in boosting employee knowledge retention and engagement at the workplace.
- Create a strong impression of content through interactive videos, engaging games, simulations and demos. This helps to increase learner engagement, collaboration and knowledge retention.
Role of Videos in Delivering Micro ContentBeing available on mobile, drives big results and provides a competitive edge for your brand. To access information just-in-time, learners mostly prefer using their smartphones or tablets. Whether in the form of YouTube videos, searches or mini-games, micro content can be accessed anytime and anywhere. Videos provide an effective way to develop and curate micro content. Knowing that delivery of microlearning centers around rapid content development, organizations are choosing videos over any other approach. Without any robust support for developing micro content, it can be tedious for employees to embed interactive multimedia such as PPT slides or graphics with microlearning. Similarly, even after the video-based content is created, it is important to ensure, that the right kind of information is shared with the right people and at the right time. There comes the use of YouTube as a medium to provide enough flexibility to access video-based.
Today, L&D teams are discovering ways to leverage the power of videos and impart e-learning solutions, for learners who are mostly on-the-go. Modern learners do not like watching lengthy videos. This makes the perfect sense of creating interactive video nuggets, which is all about imparting bite-sized content to diversified audiences. With the tremendous growth of mobile technology and its utility for continual learning, chunked content has become an extremely effective way to impart learning for a wide array of topics. Learning in bites provides the learner with concise and relevant information which is easier to retain and later, apply.