Why Micro-courses?

Micro-Learning: a holistic approach for skill-based learning and education which deals with relatively small learning units (micro-courses). It involves short-term-focused strategies specially designed for skill-based understanding/learning/education.

Research has shown time and time again that human attention span is short and getting shorter. As our ability to focus becomes more relevant, we need to understand the benefits of taking this under consideration when designing and developing training content for Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) learners.

First off, training content that is crafted in the form of smaller chunks is always easier to digest for the learner and less daunting. Specifically, video-based training in the range of 2 to 8 minutes in length is easy to consume, as you can go through a few of them during the day when you have time. However, having to watch a one-hour video is more daunting for anyone. The learner must find one hour of uninterrupted time to allocate to the training on a busy day. As we all know, something always comes up, which would make it easy for the learner to put off training for another time.?

Second, having a library of different micro-courses in your content portfolio makes it easy to tailor a curriculum for your learner community. You can craft a collection of micro-courses that is perfectly suited to the needs of your learners. If all you had were large chunks of content, it would be hard to take bits and pieces of that and mix them up. This may result in learners spending time on content that is not relevant to their jobs. Micro-courses solve that problem.

Lastly, micro-courses enable learners to go back and refresh on a specific skill with great ease. Imagine this scenario: you need to do something in D365, but you cannot remember how to do it. If your content consists of large videos it is quite the challenge to go back and refresh on that skill. You have to open up an hour-long video that covers many topics and try to find where the specific information is located. This can be a big hassle and takes too much time. On the other hand, if your content is in smaller chunks, you could simply search and find the exact video that covers the piece of information you need.

Microlearning is the next step in learning and online training capabilities help this transition. Having smaller chunks of content takes into account the direction we are going as a society today with shorter attention spans. We can use this to our advantage in D365 implementations. Micro courses are easier to digest, ideal for creating specific role-based D365 curriculum and allow for users to go back and regain D365 skills with ease.

If you are interested in learning more, please connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, or watch me on YouTube.