What is Microlearning?

The concept of nudge is of paramount importance to bring behavioral changes in people. Microlearning is nudging in a learning and development context. It is content delivered in a nugget to reinforce knowledge or skill.

What’s the purpose of Microlearning?

Microlesson should be used as reinforcement, a kind of supplement to formal training. It can also take the form of Just-In-Time (JIT) learning before performing a critical job. Sometimes it can be a curtain raiser for a formal training.

How Micromodules are different from traditional e-learning?

The aim of Micromodules is to improve the performance of learners in organizations. Here we don’t talk of learning objectives as in traditional eLearning but performance objectives. Microlearning gives a perfect adult learning experience where the learner always looks for the usefulness of the knowledge learnt. And one strict no-no in Microlearning approach is introducing a new or lengthy concept in the lesson.

Ideal duration in Microlearning:

In Microlearning, small is beautiful. The duration of a Micromodule could be from 2-3 minutes to 5-10 minutes depending on the context. Anything less than 10 minutes is best.

Guidelines for curating Microlearning content:

The content in Microlearning should be concise, should be skimmable, self-paced and be written in an informal language.

In a nutshell:

In a mobile and connected world, Microlearning is here to stay as reinforcement in learning. It’s a valuable add-on to the traditional elearning way.