Microlearnings Changing How You Do Business
What Is Microlearning, What It Isn’t, And Why You Need It
Microlearning packs a big punch.
It’s the more engaging, less time-consuming, and cheaper-to-produce sibling of regular eLearning. While it’s not the best solution for every training need, it's a surprisingly effective one for corporate and commercial training.
By the end of this article, you’ll know what microlearning is, what its characteristics are, and how to use it in your training. Let’s start at the beginning.
Back To Basics: What Is Microlearning?
While there’s no official microlearning definition, all microlearning-based training shares one key characteristic: brevity. This could either be small learning units or short-term learning activities.
Microtraining delivers short bursts of content for learners to study at their convenience. Content can take many forms, from text to full-blown interactive multimedia, but should always be short.
Here are some microlearning content examples:
Text (phrases, short paragraphs)
Images (photos, illustrations)
Videos (of the short variety)
Audio (short snippets of speech or music)
Tests and Quizzes
Games (e.g. simple single-screen challenges)
What Are The Benefits Of Microlearning?
1. It’s Faster To Deliver
Fewer things to write means shorter course delivery times. With microlearning, you can build a course with dozens of units in an hour. This lets you respond faster to changing business goals and new training demands.
2. It’s More Affordable
A microlearning course is also much cheaper to produce. It requires fewer resources and needs fewer instructors. You don’t even need any special "microlearning tools" to create your content; a regular LMS content editor will do - though, of course, a specialized microlearning-based platform like TalentLMS will make the process much easier.
3. It’s Flexible
Microlearning courses can cover any subject that regular eLearning courses can; just in a bite-sized way. You can create courses that give a broad overview of a subject or even create ones for complex topics.
4. Learners Find It More Engaging
Microtraining is the most engaging training delivery method available. The microlearning experience is similar to checking your favorite social app on your smartphone, compared to the "serious study" feel of regular training.
5. It Boosts Knowledge Retention
According to microlearning research, when you study something repeatedly and revisit it when you are close to forgetting it, you retain it much better. Such repeated study fits nicely with microlearning units since they are small, self-contained, and easy to return to.
6. It Gives Learners More Freedom
Regular online training that uses text-heavy courses is not ideal for studying in short stints. Microlearning, on the other hand, lets your learners enjoy casual learning whenever they have some spare time. Plus, since microtraining courses are small, they’re also easy to download and take with you when offline.