Microlearning Examples

Microlearning examples – 7 actionable use cases

Microlearning examples - 7 actionable use cases

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01 On boarding

02 Compliance and certification

03 Company culture

04 Product knowledge

05 Addressing the skills gap

06 Keeping everyone on-brand

07 Introducing new policies

One of the most attractive aspects of microlearning is how versatile it is. Microlearning techniques can be applied across the board, from the most formal to the most informal types of instruction. We’ve already looked at how Moodle can provide the ideal hub for microlearning activity, and we’ve offered our top tips for successful microlearning. 

In this article, we’ll look at some of the practical scenarios in which this style of learning can be applied, drawing on our experience working with organizations of all shapes, sizes, and verticals around the globe. 

01 Onboarding new employees

Starting a new job is probably the most learning-intensive period of most of your career. There’s a multitude of new information to digest, not only in terms of the requirements of the role, but also a new company culture, new styles of communication, and new processes, policies, and workflows to familiarise yourself with.

From an organisational perspective, there are dual priorities. L&D teams want to ensure that new starters are supplied with all the information they’ll need, and given the time and space to understand it properly before being “thrown in at the deep end”, but equally, there’s a pressure to reduce the time-to-competence as far as possible. The sooner each new recruit can reach optimal performance, the better for the customer, and the bottom line.

Using microlearning strategies can help to streamline this onboarding process, both by breaking down what can seem like an impenetrable wall of new data into manageable chunks and also by spreading out the necessary learning over the new employee’s onboarding period. Microlearning allows recruits to get started on the tasks they are confident in doing, and then access the extra training they need on-demand as their responsibilities gradually ramp up over time.

 
  • Micro-inductions prior to the start date let recruits hit the ground running
  • Just-in-time learning introduces new skills one at a time, as needed
  • Mobile access and instant support facilitate learning on the job

02 Managing compliance and certification

If you’re working in a highly regulated industry, then ensuring your employees maintain compliance and keep up to date with relevant certifications is a big part of workplace learning. A common problem with this type of learning can be engaging and enthusing learners – often content based on policies, regulations and laws can be viewed as dry or dull, and staying up-to-date is seen as a chore. 

Microlearning can help inject some fun back into the process, breaking up long-form resources and activities into more interactive and enjoyable learning experiences. Spreading out learning in this way not only reduces fatigue but also improves retention and attainment rates. 

For some purposes, microlearning alone may not be an appropriate solution. But using a blend of traditional instruction and microlearning activities can help to break up the monotony and increase completion rates. It’s worth experimenting with different formats, activity types and styles to find the perfect balance for your organisation.

  • Use conversational language to keep engagement levels high
  • Combine media such as video, audio and games to maintain attention
  • Keep learners up to date with new information in real-time

03 Supporting company culture

Not all learning and development is specifically related to job roles – embedding the company culture and values is also an important part of workplace learning. Microlearning lends itself well to this type of content, as it is usually relatively informal, and not assessment based. 

At Titus, we use microlearning on a regular basis to inform our team about new community initiatives, company-wide projects such as our recent rebrand, interviews with new staff members, updates on social events and as a basis to explore and discuss important topics such as Black History Month or Pride Month. It’s a great way of bringing the team together and ensuring our culture is shared and not simply applied from the management level – especially with our remote and hybrid working colleagues. 

While formal assessments may not be necessary for this context, it’s a good idea to introduce some form of quiz or survey to assess how effectively learners have understood and retained the microlearning content. This provides invaluable data to inform the planning and format of future activities.

 
  • Use microlearning to share company updates across teams and departments
  • Create learning events for specific topics or causes the company supports
  • Design short feedback questionnaires or surveys to assess uptake

04 Just-in-time product knowledge

Product (or service) knowledge is a key area of competence for a wide range of roles. In businesses where new products are released or updated on a frequent basis, keeping employees up-to-date with features, pricing, packages and offers can be a major challenge. 

Microlearning is an ideal solution to this problem, enabling organisations to create rapidly authored training content that breaks down the necessary information by individual product, allowing staff to access the facts and figures they need on a case-by-case basis. 

This type of just-in-time learning reduces the need for lengthy training sessions each time a new product reaches the market and empowers employees to pick and choose the learning they need to carry out their role. 

The use of mobile devices introduces even greater flexibility, enabling employees to quickly skill up on the latest relevant product information in real-time, and reducing time wasted learning about products that they may not be dealing with at that time. 

  • Create at-a-glance product sheets to allow rapid, real-time learning
  • Ensure your content is mobile-friendly so staff can learn from anywhere
  • Use push notifications to send new learning content to the relevant staff

05 Addressing the skills gap

While microlearning is typically applied to so-called “soft” skills, many organisations are seeing the value in this type of instruction for more technical or qualifications, and using microlearning, in combination with other techniques, to help employees learn in-demand skills such as coding, data analysis, systems architecture and project management. 

Microlearning activities can form part of an overall course, with a variety of potential applications including top-up learning to be consumed between more formal sessions, revision aids in advance of assessments, or simply to further explore areas of interest.

Making learning available on-demand from any device is particularly important to meet the expectations of digitally native generations, who are most comfortable working with bite-sized and modular content, and expect to be able to complete research and assignments from a variety of devices. 

  • Use microlearning to support more traditional instruction
  • Update current content for a new generation of learners
  • Meet internal needs for upskilling or reskilling effectively

06 Keeping everyone on-brand

In many organisations, the outward-facing company brand can be disconnected from the internal experience of employees. Strong brands rely on everyone in the business understanding the meaning, purpose and vision behind them, and being able to accurately describe the company’s mission. 

Microlearning is an excellent avenue for promoting your brand internally, whether that’s letting everybody in the organisation know about the launch of a new visual identity, updating the company’s mission statement, formulating a response to your business being featured in the press or on social media, or setting the tone and style of communications. 

Using a variety of media helps to ensure that your brand message is easy to interpret, understand and remember. Video, images and audio content can all convey the brand values and guidelines, to foster a more inclusive culture where everyone is able to represent and promote the organisation, and feed their views and opinions back to the leadership team. 

  • Centralise your brand messaging by pushing out updates to staff
  • Gather feedback on the company’s mission and purpose
  • Create a culture of inclusion where everyone feels part of the brand

07 Introducing new policies

In a similar vein to our point on company culture above, microlearning is also a great way to disseminate important information about company policies or regulations. The traditional method of sending round-robin emails with attached memos is not the most engaging way of educating staff on new policies, and often business-critical information can go unread. 

Microlearning helps ensure that not only do your employees read the latest policy or procedural directives but that they have digested and understood the material. Using short video clips, infographics or animations to explain a new policy can be followed by a short survey or quiz to give valuable insight into the proportion of the team who have taken the information onboard. 

It’s particularly effective for policy announcements that need to be understood and acted on immediately, or where the consequences, if the policy is not followed, pose a significant risk to the business. For example, at Titus we used microlearning-style content, available on employee’s mobile devices, to explain the changing policies around COVID safety in the office, updated as the government guidance developed. 

  • Create short courses to introduce complex policies step by step
  • Use mobile-friendly content to make it easy for staff to engage
  • Follow up with a micro-assessment to measure understanding

Getting Started

If your organisation would benefit from some practical advice on using microlearning techniques to facilitate onboarding, compliance, product training or qualifications, we’d be happy to offer the benefit of our experience, Speak to one of our team to learn more about how Moodle supports microlearning and improves learner engagement and attainment.

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Microlearning with Moodle – The Ultimate Guide

Microlearning with Moodle
The Ultimate Guide

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What is microlearning

01 Microlearning with Moodle

02 Moodle Features

What is microlearning?

Microlearning is an approach to learning and development, based around offering the learner bite-sized content items or assessments to help them achieve a defined goal. It tends to focus on practice over theory and aims to solve an immediate problem, rather than building towards an assessment over weeks or months. 

Microlearning is an approach that we use all the time in our daily lives, almost without noticing.

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Whether it’s watching a 5 minute YouTube video on how to cook a new dish, reading the assembly instructions for the flat-pack wardrobe you’re about to put together, or checking a translation app for the few words of Italian you need to make a hotel reservation, microlearning is the most natural way to learn small amounts of new information just when you need them most. 

We can break down the definition of what counts as microlearning as follows:

On-demand: The learning can be located, and completed in real-time, i.e. at the time when it’s needed.

Self-service: The necessary content is available to the user without relying on a tutor or trainer to interpret or deliver it. 

Focused: A micro-lesson targets a specific topic, without long introductions, discussion of theory or prerequisite.

01 So, where does Moodle come in?

Having read the description above, you might be wondering why you’d need to use an LMS as part of your microlearning strategy. Learning platforms are for traditional, instructor-led, assessment-based courses, right?

Right.  

Well, not quite right. In the workplace, allowing employees the freedom to pursue learning in a self-directed, unscheduled format is great in terms of empowerment, engagement and motivation. But to be most effective, there are two additional elements that need to be considered.

 

Curation

Thanks to the near-universal ownership of always-connected smartphones, today’s workplace learners literally have the world’s knowledge at their fingertips. But that’s not to say that all of the information you can find on a particular topic is valuable. There’s a lot of incomplete, out-of-date or simply incorrect content out there, which has the potential to confuse or mislead learners, especially those new to a topic. 

Even in the self-service, learner-driven world of microlearning, there’s still an important role to play for trainers and course leaders. Rather than directly teaching learners, they play a vital role in guiding them, by reviewing and suggesting appropriate resources and activities which will keep their learning on the right track. 

Here’s where Moodle comes in – organizations can use their LMS to serve as a repository, combining specialist content generated in-house, with links to external resources elsewhere on the web which have been evaluated and vetted to ensure they support a particular learning goal. 

Learners can still be encouraged to explore further – this is a great way of collecting new and relevant user-curated content, but using the communication tools available through Moodle, they are able to pass any new resources they come across to their course leader or L&D manager to check their validity and value. 

 

Tracking

Another key function of Moodle for organizations pursuing microlearning is its ability to track and report on learners’ progress and achievements. At first sight, this might seem to run counter to the idea of microlearning as a discipline free from formal instruction and assessment. But for most businesses, some form of demonstrating and evaluating what employees are learning is necessary, in order to justify the time and budget spent providing learning opportunities.

So, to keep track of how employees are engaging with microlearning, how often they are undertaking it, and what they’re learning as a result, it’s useful to have a centralised system that can reliably record this data and allow L&D leaders to review and analyse it, in order to optimise their approach and ensure the best return on investment. 

Moodle excels at this, allowing course creators to build in micro-assessments without significantly disrupting the free flow of learning, and providing the reports needed to develop an accurate picture of how microlearning is working for the organisation and its employees. We’ll discuss the exact features which make this possible in our section on reporting, later in this article.

 

02 Let’s look at how Moodle can support effective microlearning

Resources

First of all, your Moodle LMS provides an ideal repository to host all of the microlearning content your learners need, and make it accessible 24/7, from any connected device. This is crucial for on-demand learning. Moodle allows you to create, publish and share content in a range of formats, including:

Text 

Text content in microlearning needs to be purpose-built. It should be short, to the point, and easy to digest. Headlines, quotes, bulleted lists, or tweet-sized paragraphs are all effective ways to communicate a single point or concept. Steer clear of multi-page documents, in-depth articles or long-form posts.

Images 

A picture is worth a thousand words, or so the saying goes. When designing visual aids for microlearning, there are a few important rules to keep in mind. The image should be simple and easy to digest, it should be decipherable without referencing supporting materials, and it should be clearly annotated to aid understanding. 

Infographics, charts and graphs, colour-coded maps, labelled diagrams, or comic-style storytelling are all excellent examples of how images can be used in microlearning.

Videos

With video, it’s important to keep things short and sweet. If you’ve ever seen a 30-minute screencast with a voiceover walking you through every feature of a piece of software, you’ll know how tempting it is to switch off after a couple of minutes, and how little information you actually take in. 

For microlearning purposes, stick to short videos, no more than two to three minutes each, and make sure they are visually engaging, as well as professionally edited and soundtracked. There’s nothing more likely than crackly audio or low-resolution screenshots to get viewers reaching for the stop button.

Audio 

Audio is an excellent medium for flexible microlearning which can be consumed while commuting. Podcasts are an obvious example of this, but as with the video content we mentioned above, quality is important to keep people engaged – so invest in some decent kit or outsource the production to a specialist provider. 

The audio experience should also be considered when preparing text or image content. For accessibility purposes, such as learners using a text-to-speech screen reader it’s important that text is formatted consistently and images are appropriately tagged and described.

Resources

Secondly, Moodle is the perfect solution to facilitate interaction and collaboration. Microlearning works best when the learner can immediately, or at least quickly, access feedback on what they’ve learned, either automatically, such as a scored quiz, or personally, from their peers. Moodle has a number of activity types that support this:

Quizzes

Within Moodle, it’s very straightforward to set up self-marking quizzes which can give learners immediate feedback on their understanding of a micro topic. Quizzes don’t have to be long, drawn-out assessments – they can be simple 3-5 question tests which focus on a single learning item and assess how well the learner has understood it. 

Learners’ scores are automatically logged in the Moodle gradebook, which helps to keep track of individual and group progress, as discussed in our section on tracking earlier in this article.

Games 

Learning through play is just as valuable in the workplace as it is in nursery school, believe it or not! There is substantial research in support of the idea that where employees can interact with learning materials, choosing their own paths, receiving real-time scores based on how well they’re doing and comparing themselves to the performance of their peers, they learn and retain information better. 

Gamification is a complex topic, which could fill a whole article on its own, so for now, let’s just say that game-based learning featuring the use of role-play and interaction with realistic scenarios has great potential for improving both employee engagement and attainment. If you don’t have the in-house capability to develop these types of learning material, many content providers will offer off-the-shelf games or bespoke development services.

Forums

Forums within Moodle can act as a communication tool, allowing for topical discussion, requests for assistance or clarification, and questions to be put to course leaders or trainers. 

They also provide the perfect opportunity for peer-to-peer learning, with all discussions visible to both fellow learners and the L&D team, which means that should a group of learners veer off course in terms of their understanding of the material, a course leader can step in to make the necessary corrections, or recommend useful resources to provide the missing information.

Glossaries/wikis

Moodle allows for the creation of collaborative resources, such as a wiki or glossary for a particular topic which can be contributed to by learners and moderated by trainers or course leaders. 

This allows for reflective microlearning, in which a learner can spend a few minutes describing or explaining a topic they have just covered, reinforcing their own learning while providing useful content for their peers. 

User contributions can also prompt peer-to-peer discussion of the topic as different learners collaborate to arrive at the optimal definition or explanation of a given concept, which is a great opportunity for social learning.

Learning paths

Thirdly, hosting your microlearning content in your Moodle introduces the possibility of conditional learning paths, which are a great way of giving learners valuable guidance, while still allowing them autonomy over the direction of their own learning. 

Conditional learning involves creating several potential routes through the available content, based on “if this, then that” logic. So, once a piece of microlearning has been completed, for example, a short quiz, the individual learner can be directed to the next options available based on their performance. 

If our imaginary learner did well on the quiz, Moodle can present them with some introductory activities for a new topic. If they did badly, Moodle can suggest a video recap of the topic, an infographic to explain it in a different way, etc.

Reminders

Another key factor in the success of a microlearning approach is the frequency and regularity with which learners engage with resources and activities. Microlearning doesn’t work well unless learners get into the habit of doing “ a little, and often”. To help form these productive habits, Moodle allows you to set reminders and notifications to remind your employees to log in and complete their next item of microlearning. 

The LMS can also notify L&D managers if certain individuals have fallen behind with their learning, perhaps having not logged in, or not completed an item of microlearning for a certain number of days, which allows them to investigate and provide targeted support if needed.

Reporting

Finally, Moodle is extremely capable when it comes to evaluating and analysing microlearning within an organisation. The data generated as learners access, complete and demonstrate their learning is centralised and can be accessed by L&D manager in the form of graphical dashboards or detailed reports, allowing them to see what’s working well and what can be improved, view learner attainment at an individual or group level, and calculate the value add achieved.

This is a crucial aspect of managing microlearning, ensuring that employees’ progress is recognised and recorded and that L&D departments can implement a culture of continual improvement as well as justifying their spending on learning provision at budget reviews.

Getting Started

If you’d like to know more about how Moodle can support the adoption of microlearning within your team, department or organisation, and help you evaluate its success, get in touch with one of our team to discuss your specific requirements – no strings attached.

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