The conventional educational approaches make content creators divide eLearning courses into chapters or units based on specific concepts or topics. Both students and corporate employees have to put extra time and effort to acquire and retain knowledge about a particular topic or concept at a time. Microlearning overcomes this major shortcoming of the conventional educational approaches by emphasizing the delivery of short bursts of content and the development of smaller learning units.
According to Wikipedia,
“Microlearning is a holistic approach for skill-based learning and education which deals with relatively small learning units. It involves short-term-focused strategies specially designed for skill-based understanding/learning/education.”
At present, microlearning is one of the hottest trends in eLearning as well as employee learning and development (EL&D). While creating eLearning content, content creators explore ways to create short bursts of content by modifying text, video, audio, and images. Likewise, most enterprises have been implementing microlearning while designing skill development, onboarding, and compliance training. Your organization can easily boost EL&D by leveraging several benefits of microlearning.
10 Benefits of Microlearning to Boost Employee Learning and Development Programs
Speed up Course Development and Delivery
The content creators have to put in extra time and effort to create the long-form eLearning content. But they can save both time and effort by dividing a concept or chapter into multiple and small units. The shorter content development cycle will make it easier for your organization to develop and deliver new training programs regularly.
Update Content Immediately
In addition to creating fresh content, the L&D managers these days explore ways to provide up-to-date knowledge to every employee. The large lessons do not convey the updated information to learners in a few minutes. But the short burst of content can convey the relevant and updated information to a learner in a few minutes. Also, the content authors can deliver updated information to the learners by making changes to the small lessons in a short amount of time.
Accelerate Course Deployment
While creating corporate training materials, content authors these days use audio, video, podcasts, and other multimedia content. The administrators need additional time to deploy a lesson containing long video clips or large multimedia files. Also, the delivery and accessibility of the course are affected when multiple learners access the same content simultaneously. But the administrators can deploy the small learning units smoothly and the learners can access the content seamlessly.
Boost Self-Paced Learning
While implementing EL&D, you must remember that most employees will access the lessons and content on their smartphones. Also, they will acquire knowledge and skills over a period of time due to their busy work schedules. You cannot optimize self-paced learning without switching from conventional educational approaches to microlearning. Microlearning makes employees acquire, retain, and apply knowledge by mitigating a major challenge – short attention spans. They can access the microlearning nuggets to acquire knowledge and skill after working hours and during the spare time at work.
Keep Learners Engaged and Motivated
As employees learn after working hours, the L&D managers have to explore ways to persuade and motivate them to learn. A manager cannot persuade employees to acquire knowledge and complete courses regularly without keeping them engaged. The microlearning nuggets are more interactive and appealing than conventional eLearning content. The content creators make the microlearning nuggets more engaging and competitive by including popular gamification elements.
Facilitate Knowledge Retention
Microlearning has been gaining popularity as a leaner-centric educational approach. It enables learners to focus on a single topic or concept at a time. Instead of spending several hours, the learner can understand a concept in a few hours by accessing microlearning nuggets. The microlearning nuggets further provide just-in-time access to the content and information to the learners. Hence, microlearning helps learners to acquire, retain, and apply knowledge by dividing long lessons into easy-to-digest learning units.
Support Transfer of Learning
According to KnowledgeForceConsulting.com,
“SH!FT reports that research discussed in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that when people learn smaller amounts of material at a time, the transfer of learning is 17% more efficient than when they are expected to learn more material at once.“
Unlike the conventional educational approach, microlearning makes learners focus on a single topic at a time. In addition to helping employees to retain knowledge, microlearning boosts their efficiency and productivity by making them apply skills, strategies, and information.
Improve Course Completion Rate
Most organizations these days use course completion rate as the key metric to measure the performance of EL&D programs. But the L&D managers frequently explore ways to increase course completion rate by keeping learners engaged and motivated. Your organization can easily keep the learners engaged and motivated by implementing microlearning. According to the microlearning statistics posted on KnowledgeForceConsulting.com, “Microlearning can boost engagement to more than 50%.”
Options to Include Gamification Elements
Like microlearning, gamification is one of the hottest employee learning and development trends. Gamification makes corporate learners feel motivated and productive just like school and college students. The long lessons often make it difficult for content creators to implement and embed various gamification elements. But the content creators find it easier to gamify the small lessons and short bursts of content. Your organization can boost the learning experience and facilitate learning transfer by integrating popular eLearning trends like microlearning and gamification.
Curtail Overall Corporate Training Cost
Several studies have highlighted the decrease in corporate training time and cost as one of the key benefits of microlearning. Ray Jimenez, the eminent learning expert, has cited several case studies to highlight the effectiveness of microlearning in reducing the eLearning content development time by 300% and reducing the eLearning content development costs by 50%. Hence, your organization can train, upskill, and reskill a large workforce in a cost-efficient way by switching to microlearning.
Microlearning is currently one of the hottest employees and learning development trends. Multiple educational institutes and corporates are adopting it, thanks to the multiple benefits of microlearning.
The LMS platform developed by Mintbook helps your organization to switch from conventional educational approaches to microlearning by providing robust content authoring tools. Also, your organization can provide employees with access to a wide range of content by integrating the LMS with a relevant digital library.
