Five Keys to Delivering Impactful Microlearning

At Junction we work with a broad range of clients covering all forms and fashion of learning from college publishers to primary/secondary school curriculum companies and even B2B/B2C corporate and personal learning.  One of the big pushes we’ve seen a number of clients pursue in 2018 as they ramp up product development on Junction is in micro-learning.

Without diving deep into “what is micro-learning?” here – though that might make another good post – we thought we’d share a few lessons learned that might help any content provider who is exploring launching their first micro-learning programs in the months ahead (oh, you don’t want to miss launching in 2019, the “Year of Micro-Learning” or yet another post to be written).

Without further ado, here are five keys to delivering successful microlearning brought to you by your friends at Junction Education:

  1. Finish Before You Begin – yes, it’s backward-design redux, but that’s because it holds as true in micro-learning as it does in a classroom or seminar.  Map what you want your learners to take away before starting to build a curriculum and instructional plan and sequence.
  2. Short and Sweet – Don’t try to cram or reduce 50-100 hours of instruction into a short-form course, it won’t work (at least not well).  You’ll need to do ground-up development to ensure that your lessons are punchy, 5-8 minutes per module is about right.  Much tighter than the 55-75 minutes per session we see with college students using Junction.
  3. Hand it Over – Across Junction clients, over 30% of new users come in on mobile devices, predominantly smartphones.  Whatever you build needs to fit and play nicely on smaller screens and still be a full-featured experience.  BTW, mobile growth is solid double-digits, you need to be here.  The days of desktop-only, Flash-heavy, learning environments are long gone.
  4. Metrics Matter – You don’t want to bury instructors or learners in endless charts and graphs, they won’t spend much time looking at them or trying to parse the data to draw inferences and conclusions.  Deliver user-friendly recommendations and suggestions instead.
  5. Across the Line – micro-learning course developers need to keep a relentless focus on course completion rates and constantly optimize and tune everything from instructional flow to engagement tools and balance between length of prose vs. media elements and depth and variety in assessment items.  Part of this is to keep your courses fresh but the bigger objective is that as your audiences ramp up different needs sets will emerge and making changes to your microlearning courses, in near real-time, is essential to success.

There you have it, our top tips – at least right now, we’re always crunching the data too! – about designing, building and delivering easy-to-use, successful and scalable micro-learning.

Shameless plug: if you’d like to learn more about how Junction can help you and your colleagues quickly and easily generate new revenue from micro-learning drop us a line.