Course Outcomes

This microlearning training course will:

  • Offer a thorough overview of best practices for leveraging microlearning.
  • Provide frameworks for creating, curating, and crowdsourcing content.
  • Review popular creation tools.
  • Suggest a process for keeping a microlearning library current.

Course Overview

Many of today’s learners suffer from overwhelming schedules and a deficit of hours available for training. A two-day class, are you kidding? That is not happening. How about a day? Maybe once a year. A half day? Even then, many people don’t have the time. In the worst cases, some learners can’t find even an hour of quiet to dedicate to uninterrupted study. While one can debate the merits of employees stretched to the point they have no time for development, a more practical and immediate solution exists: microlearning. These narrowly focused small chunks of content meet learners’ needs without taking them away from their work for hours at a time.

Whether it’s working with learners’ compressed schedules, seeking ways to add variety to training, or searching for ways to offer on-demand learning solutions, microlearning offers a lot.  

This training course focuses on the ins and outs of designing and using microlearning in a range of environments. The program is taught in a hands-on workshop format. The two-day version of the workshop allows participants laboratory time to practice a wider range of tools and concepts in class.

Program Objectives

At this program’s conclusion, participants should be able to:

  • Identify microlearning opportunities.
  • Separate “nice-to-know” material from “need-to-know” information.
  • Isolate a learning goal and objectives.
  • Follow best practices for creating short videos, interactive articles, quizzes, and infographics.
  • Arrange information in a logical sequence.
  • Determine the best delivery vehicle.
  • Repurpose existing content.
  • Edit their content ruthlessly.
  • Gather learner feedback.
  • Create sticky content.
  • Promote their microlearning materials to learners.
  • Follow best practices to keep their libraries current.

The following outline highlights some of the course’s key learning points. As part of your training program, we will modify content as needed to meet your business objectives. Upon request, we will provide you with a copy of the participant materials prior to the session(s).

Workshop Outline

The Big Benefits of Small Bites: The Value of Microlearning

When it’s done well, microlearning offers a multitude of benefits: It’s flexible, relevant to learners’ needs, delivered in digestible pieces, personalized, easier to update than longer courses, and cost effective. In this opening segment, we will look at how various organizations have leveraged microlearning and the benefits they’ve realized by adding this type of training to their employee-development efforts. Next, participants will spend some time brainstorming examples of how they might implement microlearning in their workplace: as a substitute for longer training, as on-the-job training support, as refresher support for longer training, as self-serve learning, and so forth.

Practical Considerations: Organizing and Disseminating Microlearning

Before you begin building microlearning, it’s helpful to know where you will house it and how you will deliver it to your learners. This part of the workshop reviews a range of storage and delivery options for a variety of budgets and technical abilities. Additionally, we will look at data concerns and a checklist to determine whether security should be a primary consideration when choosing storage and delivery methods.

Choices Choices: Choosing the Right Format

Sometimes video is the answer, sometimes a job aid is a better choice, and sometimes an interactive article will meet a learning need faster and better than a video or infographic. In this program segment, we will look at options available to designers and considerations for choosing a delivery method: the learning goal, available technology, time, costs, resources, and other factors.

The Foundation: The Basics of Microlearning Design

Once participants understand the delivery options available to them, we will shift our focus to hands-on design.  In this portion of the workshop, we will explore best practices for articulating learning benefits, identifying a training objective, isolating need-to-know information, selecting a training medium, and creating a narrative. Next, participants will work through a planning template using their real-life examples.

Technology Know-How: Understanding What’s Available

In the right hands, a superior tool can accomplish more than an inferior one every time. This module introduces over a dozen content creation tools for producing videos, making interactive PDFs, constructing quizzes, building video walls, and more.

Marketing Know-How: Meeting Learner Needs and Promoting Results

Great training that nobody uses hardly qualifies as a success. In this part of the workshop, we’ll discuss methods for making content searchable, promoting microlearning, and making content sticky.

Growing the Library: Curating and Crowdsourcing Content

Just because you’re in the learning and development department, that doesn’t mean you’re a subject matter expert or the best person to create microlearning. This workshop module introduces a methodology for curating and crowdsourcing content.

Refresh, Revise, Renew: Keeping Content Current

Rare is the organization that builds an initial microlearning library and that’s the end. As with any content, strong microlearning libraries are on a steady diet of content revisions and refreshes. After all, what is the likelihood that what we think is relevant and current today will be the same in five years?  This final training program segment introduces best practices for managing a growing library, adding learning, sunsetting content, and refreshing materials.

By the conclusion of this microlearning design course, participants should have a solid understanding of what they need to do to create, curate, and crowdsource strong microlearning. Furthermore, they will know how to choose a delivery structure and a process for keeping their library of learning current.