Microlearning
Learning is more important than ever. Companies that don’t train their staff lose money and employees. And yet it’s harder and harder to find time for training. Microlearning — tiny, self-contained learning experiences — promises a solution:
In short, it’s short. What can we teach a customer in 2 minutes or less? To help, slide 32 gives us a few ideas:
- Do something new.
- Solve a problem.
- Apply something you know.
- Discover more options.
- Change the way you do something.
You can probably think of times you learned something valuable in each of these areas, in far less than 2 minutes.
Microlearning gets better engagement. We can learn on the go, pick up useful tidbits to apply straight away. It’s easily understood and we’re not forced to follow along with something for ages, waiting for the pay off.
Publishers have not embraced micropublishing until now, because getting people to buy a 3-page book is hard. Micropayments, in app purchases, and subscriptions change that. Microlearning can happen inside a library app or site.
BuzzfeedNews’ Instagram feed pushes the limits of Microlearning, packing 4 news stories into a single square image.
Stackoverflow is a kind of microlearning. The most popular are often self-contained mini tutorials, a couple of hundred words long. And I’m surprised how often “why” questions make it to the top of Stackoverflow. Programmers don’t just want their code to work, they want to understand.
Dummies extracts microlearning experiences from its products and monetizes them with advertising. Dummies books have always been structured as a sequence of microlearning experiences. They know their readers need to be kept engaged through challenging material.
As publishers we need to explore the limits of microlearning for our customers. What do our readers look for in a learning experience, and how can we concentrate that value into the most frictionless individual payload?
