Moving to Microlearning

Moving to Microlearning

Twenty years after the advent of the internet, digital life is upon us all. The “Internet of Things” brought us Amazon’s Alexa, cloud-connected mattresses, and a web-enabled refrigerator, for whatever that is worth. Corporate learning and development groups saw the potential of digitized training—the ability to train in mass saving time and money in lost productivity. Many training departments put their live training on PowerPoint, narrated what they typically said, and uploaded it to their learning management system.

The learning started with compliance training; classes that people mostly ignored. Many would hit play and work on other tasks or daydream. It was ineffective but recouped massive savings. As a public, we accepted this as okay. Training departments then moved to skills and professional development training, converting it to an online format. This move was never accepted as viable by the viewing masses.

The thumb ruble for developing an hour’s worth of in-person training hovered around 100 hours of content creation. Early in online courses, the thumb rule was approximately 500 hours to develop an hour of digital content. The focus was on creating an experience to help someone learn. Eventually, we shortchanged the process and threw shit together that didn’t work.

Content Libraries

We made an enormous push to create massive libraries of content—content that no one used. Initial training and skills-based efforts reverted to live training due to the inability to adequately transfer knowledge. Learning and development departments stood frozen in time where we had the capability to share knowledge throughout the world online, but the default was still to do this live. Today, we’re still living in a world where people keep identifying that they are not growing or advancing through corporate-sponsored learning and development efforts.

Then the Covid-19 quarantines took over, forcing most professionals into a remote work mode. Live training sessions then died. We fully realized how ineffective online training had been.

Struggle creates frustration, but it also produces new insights. While microlearning or short bursts of knowledge had subtly been on the market for years, it is now hitting full stride. The process of reinforcement repeated in micro doses mimics the decreasing attention span of society.

Microlearning is designed for follow-up action. A person experiences the learning event and immediately follows that with practice. It is taken in small steps and, because those steps are short, the learning journey is longer than in other approaches.

Hermann Ebbinghaus is possibly the father of microlearning. A German psychologist in the late 1900’s, he studied memory and discovered the forgetting curve, later finding the spaced learning theory that learning is better when spaced out over time with repetition that improved recall.

Scaffold Learning

Sixty years later, Jerome Bruner added a key element of this model unintentionally. Bruner, a psychologist focused on the development of children, founded the scaffolding learning theory. Bruner believed that knowledge is attained when organized correctly. This consists of creating building blocks of knowledge to establish a base, with new knowledge built atop that foundation.

Video games provide a fantastic modern-day example. Game designers purposely make a game easy at the beginning to encourage success and continued playing. Each stage or level progressively gets harder but encourages further play. They aim for a sweet spot of not making the experience too easy or too hard. The best games have participant maximum engagement.

Microlearning began to appear in niche applications in the early 2000’s. These were small chunks of learning that were spread out over a longer period and repeated. It focused on the design of knowledge transfer.

More recently, a newer phenomenon, gamification, has turned learning into a game. The goal centers on the learner achieving knowledge milestones and staying engaged in the process. Gamification attempts to drive engagement by turning learning into a game, be it either a race to finish or an awarding of status.

Gamification

Ideally, microlearning pairs well with gamification, as a game encourages the continuation of small task accomplishment. An example is a local Taekwondo club. Their process blends microlearning with gamification brilliantly.

A new student enters the program as a white belt. They then attend a session where they practice one skill. This skill could be a kicking or punching movement, it could also be moving into a defensive posture. At the end of the lesson, if they have performed well, they acquire half of a tape stripe on their belt. The next lesson where this skill is taught, if they master it, they receive a full stripe. Once that student earns five stripes, or masters five movements, they then test for their next belt. The student establishes a foundation of knowledge and skills then builds upon those as they progress through a 20-belt program. At the conclusion, those that progress achieve a black belt for their mastery of the art.

Microlearning is gaining popularity, with the data to support its growth. Studies have found that microlearning is 17% more effective than traditional models in the transfer of knowledge, with an 80% improvement in long-term retention and 58% higher learning engagement.

This essay therefore asks, why do we keep our old methods? The transition to microlearning takes effort. The transformation is hard, and experts are needed to implement it correctly. However, the alternative is knowingly throwing money away.

References

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