Making the Case for Microlearning

Way back in the early days of Saturday Night Live, in the era of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, there was a character called Father Guido Sarducci. He was a chain-smoking, street-savvy Cardinal working directly for the Vatican who made appearances usually on the show’s mock newscast, Weekend Update. One of his best spots was called the Five-Minute University. This was one of the businesses he was setting up to help make money for the church.

The courses he would offer would only be five minutes long. His premise was, you could take a whole semester of introductory Spanish, and all you’re going to remember a year later is the first thing you heard: ?Como estas? Moy buen.

So that’s all they would teach you. ?Como estas? Moy buen. The course cost five dollars and lasted five minutes and they would give you a certificate for basic Spanish.

They also had a five minute course in Economics. The entirety of the education was, “you buy something and then you sell it for more.” Five minutes, five bucks, a certificate in Economics.

This was back in the seventies, but he was definitely on to something.

Since 1990, I have been working in an area of business which deals with how people and technology work together. Much of this work involves consulting and writing. I have had to study a great deal about computers, networks, cybersecurity, and the psychology of the human being as an individual and in groups. And I have loved every minute of it. The experience that I have gained means that I get asked to share my knowledge by teaching it to others in a classroom setup as opposed to a keynote.

In many cases a client will ask me to deliver a full-day classroom session on a topic to a group of twenty or more people, and I have done many of these, and I have always wondered whether this approach to learning should be replaced now with microlearning.?So here’s my key message up front right now: I feel organizations should commit to more microlearning opportunities for their staff.

Microlearning refers to very short periods of learning, often covering just a single item or skill. You have already been doing it all your life. Every little life lesson that you have learned, from not touching a hot stove, to remembering to lift your car’s wipers up prior to an icy storm so that they don’t freeze to the windshield – these are all pieces of knowledge that you have amassed – and continue to amass – over your life. It’s called experience. Either you experience something – such as touching a hot stove and burning your finger, or forgetting to lift up your wiper blades – and the subsequent result stays with you and you learn to be more careful next time, or you receive timely advice from someone – a parent, friend or work colleague. “Don’t forget to wear oven mitts,” or “don’t forget to lift your wipers tonight.”

The point is, these small doses of knowledge, received by you either in advance, or after the fact, as you care for your burnt finger or try to scrape the ice from around your car’s wipers – these are manageable components.

If, however, the learning situation was more formalized – perhaps a six hour lecture from your mechanic on all the things you will need to know about looking after your car in winter, or from a parent, on everything you need to know when in the kitchen, it is likely that most of that advice will sail right by you. Why? Because it’s too much, too soon.

So why is so much corporate training based on this full-day model?

Six hours is a long time. Even a well-delivered six hour lecture complete with breakout exercises is a long time to be working on anything. To me the problem comes down to two issues: overload and relevance.

Overload comes down to the simple fact that humans cannot take in six hours’ worth of knowledge in one sitting. Herman Ebbinghaus knew this a century ago when he demonstrated his “forgetting curve,” a chart that shows how ineffective human short-term memory is in retaining new information.

As you can see, the chart is a downward curve that shows diminishing retention over time. It shows that a person may recall 100% of what is said immediately after hearing it, but will only recall 58% of it 20 minutes later, 44% of it 1 hour later, 33% of it one day later, and 21% of it one month later. That’s not great ROI for the student or in the case of corporate training, for the company. If you have ever tried to learn a new language, you know how it feels. Learning takes awareness, practice, time, and relevance. Most training courses only deliver the first of these and unfortunately, awareness without practice simply evaporates. This again was the basis for Father Guido’s Five Minute University.

Secondly, learning without relevance will also lead to failure. Six hours of new knowledge not only can find no place to stay inside overloaded human memory, it will also lack anything to latch on to if it is not going to be used right away. Learning requires relevance. If I want to learn how to do a certain thing, it helps if that certain thing is part of my immediate future or my present. That’s when I need it and by doing it the learning item has a greater chance of being retained. Otherwise all those handouts and PowerPoints will simply go to waste. Endless binders full of paper that end up on what corporate trainers call the vinyl morgue or the shelf of shame.

So why is so much teaching done this way? Two reasons really. The first is seen in the acronym TWHADI – which means “that’s how we’ve always done it.” Prior to the internet and social media there was only one way to teach a group of people some new knowledge, and that was to crowd them into a single room where they could all hear the teacher at the same time.

But from this also stems a larger motivation, and that is economics. It seems to be cheaper to run one class for 30 people than it is to teach 30 people individually. Once the teaching is done it’s up to the student to make something of it and if they fail, it becomes their fault. I have always found this to be patently unfair. For not only is a six-hour class way too much information for humans to absorb, different people have different ways of learning, different attention spans and different personalities. Not everyone is extrovert enough to be able to ask the questions they need to ask. Not everyone can grasp a teacher’s particular way of teaching. Not everyone wants the training at all. Thus the student body is condemned to occupy a bell curve, with a few keeners and achievers occupying the cherished front end of the curve, and everyone else finding some place further back. It’s like the old expression for buying new windows for your home: the cheapest windows are the most expensive.

The solution has been staring people in the face for decades, but is only now truly available. For example, in my experience, when planning a multi-hour full day professional development session, the stakeholders always ask that there be breakout sessions and interaction. Why? Because they know that a six-hour lecture from a subject matter expert is excruciating (especially mine). The problem is not everyone has the personality type that wants to do breakout sessions. Many people are shy. They don’t want to expose their supposed ignorance to colleagues or strangers.

Many people, of all ages, live in fear of being called on by the teacher, especially those teachers who actively seek out the quiet ones in a well-meaning but often misguided attempt to “involve everyone.” I myself have received many direct emails in the days following a teaching session which specifically said, “thanks for not making us break into groups.” I would confidently venture there are far more people who dread the breakout sessions than those who enjoy them. Again it’s an issue of the bell curve.

The only way any sort of application of the breakout session can work is when the instructor is intimately familiar with the jobs of the students, so that the exercises become directly relevant to the learning needs of the group. That’s seldom possible. First, it demands that the teacher know the students’ jobs and current circumstances very well. Secondly, most classrooms are made up of people from different departments with different jobs, which means for many topic areas, one size just cannot fit all.

It's a conundrum: students have to break away from already busy days to learn a generic version of something that they will not have the time or confidence to implement back at the workplace. Teachers are forced to deliver a condensed curriculum while struggling to engage and entertain people they have never met before.

The solution, in my mind, is for organizations to look to microlearning opportunities, using shorter, more focused lessons blended with the best that technology can provide. This might include one-hour sessions built around more relevant preparation and more detailed follow-up. Professional corporate trainers could shift their focus and their business model toward shorter but more customized teaching, rather than delivering facts through a firehose that have little chance of sticking.

There is also a need for internal knowledge bases built on a Wikipedia formula where any individual can add a new topic or update an existing topic to build an ever-evolving collection of how-to’s that include video and screen recordings. Just like the real Wikipedia, quality control and accuracy can be maintained by other internal subject matter experts through an appropriately never-ending process of editing and tweaking.

Thirdly, there are outside sources. There are many how-to videos and micro-courses available on YouTube, specialty sites like LinkedIn Learn (formerly known as Lynda.com) as well as courses delivered by specialty online schools like Teachable, colleges and universities, and professional associations. An ideal collection of relevant how-to lessons could be curated, by an internal or external training manager, replacing long one-off lectures with a viable and relevant library of manageable, on-demand learning.

Let’s also not forget digital literacy. Resources like Twitter are often maligned because being open to everyone, there’s frankly a lot of junk on there. But hidden behind or between are great resources and commentary from subject matter experts – a combination of breaking news and industry grapevine information that is essential for people in any industry to be aware of and connected to.

I remember delivering a multi-hour class to a group of paramedic supervisors – paramedics who had been promoted into regional management roles. I told them a story about a pilot project out of Germany that was using drones to fly defibrillators directly to people suffering cardiac crisis, allowing a Samaritan or friend the opportunity to use the device even before the paramedics arrived. Much like the devices now available in almost every building in North America, this defibrillator used cellphone audio and video to allow the helper to receive guidance from a professional in real time. The flying of these drones allowed vital minutes to be shaved away from the excruciating wait time at a moment of crisis. Of course, today, these drones are being used for this purpose in many parts of the world. It is no longer a new concept (see news story here). But at the time it was, and these managers, these supervisors of paramedic teams, had heard nothing about this. They even asked me how I knew about it, given that I am not a paramedic myself. And I told them – Twitter. I just latched on to a conversation about medical technology and learned about it.

(Photo of drone defibrillator courtesy Everdrone AB)

With no disrespect to the paramedics in this story, it is an example that is applicable to any professional in any industry who spends so much time each day simply keeping up with the demands of the job that there is no time to look up, look around, and see what else is going on. Add to this the fact that courses and education in general very often teach older, more established techniques, and add to this also the absolute distaste management has about employees “surfing the internet on company time.”

In saying these things, I also maintain great respect for the legions of corporate trainers and lecturers out there who work hard to deliver quality learning opportunities to their classes. I feel that in proposing a shift from multi-hour stand-up classes to curated microlearning is not a death knell to their business, which, of course is how every working person immediately interprets any type of change – as in, “will this affect my job?”

I feel that instead, those people have a terrific opportunity to evolve their craft into one that focuses on microlearning using media resources that were unavailable even just a few years ago, to deliver education that actually sticks, and whose ROI exceeds that of the centuries-old “bums in seats” mindset.

This is the transcript of the CoolTimeLife podcast entitled The Case for Microlearning. If you would like to listen to it, you can check it out at our podcast site here. If you would like to review other podcasts in this series, visit my podcast page at steveprentice.com/podcast