Have you ever attended a course and learned useful skills you were unable to use right away? By the time you needed those skills, you no longer remembered what you learned and required retraining. With hectic schedules and job pressures, you don’t have time to attend the same training twice. Wouldn’t it have been nice if what you needed to learn was available to you when you needed it? On-demand microlearning is that solution.
Microlearning is training broken down into a single objective so you can learn one thing quickly. On-demand microlearning is training that enables learners to self-serve their learning as they need it.
How to Deliver On-Demand Microlearning
To deliver a suite of on-demand microlearning, you need to think outside the box of typical learning delivery methods, such as instructor-led sessions and web-based training courses, to a more unconventional format that people can search and reference at will. That’s where MadCap Flare comes in.
Using MadCap Flare, you can create a site of microlearning topics that learners can search through, bookmark, and reference from their desktops as they are needed. What would have been a course they would have left their work to attend is now content at their fingertips available within the flow of their work.
How to Develop Microlearning
Let’s take a look at how you may put together microlearning. Imagine you were training someone on how to deliver a speech. Instead of going through all the information from beginning to end, you could break out that information into microlearning topics, which are each focused on a single objective:
● Choose a topic.
● Write an outline.
● Practice your speech.
● Watch your body language.
● Deliver your speech.
A learner could be directed to your site’s information on speeches, where they can access the topics as needed. Instead of learning now how to deliver the speech, which isn’t going to happen for a while, they could concentrate on choosing a topic. When that portion is complete and the learner is ready to start writing their speech, they can return to the site to learn about writing an outline and so on.
This type of delivery is particularly helpful for training software procedures, where learning to use different software functionality is best trained at the time you’re trying to do that work in the software.
With the flexibility of online delivery, the information doesn’t have to be static. Microlearning can be text, images, videos, audio, or any combination. Use the modality that best supports the information you’re delivering. Depending on what technology is available to you, microlearning can even be delivered via bots.
How to Find Microlearning
Although topics within a site can be accessed in any order, you still need to design how the site is navigated so your learners will know what is there and how to find what they need. Just like any learning you put together, your site will need good structure and organization.
For example, the content for delivering a speech may be presented in a sequential order, that clearly shows the hierarchy of the information, but each item within that process is an individual topic that can also be referenced on its own.
Speeches
1. Choose a topic.
2. Write an outline.
3. Practice your speech.
4. Watch your body language.
5. Deliver your speech.
At any point the learner can come back to the site and reference the one piece of information they need. If it’s information they reference often, they even have the option to bookmark it in their browser.
Microlearning has many advantages. Providing your content to learners in a way that’s just-on-time, as they need it in their job, can help people get trained and back to work with minimal interruption. The next time you’re putting together a learning course, consider if it should be microlearning topics instead.
About the Author
Victoria Clarke has more than 23 years of experience managing, mentoring, and instructing others in the fields of technical writing and instructional design and is considered a thought leader in her industry.