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by Tee Dang Mankiewicz on May 25, 2025 12:24:53 PM
As microlearning continues to emerge as an e-learning trend, HR visionaries and management need to keep up with best practices. The following article will elaborate on leveraging microlearning to achieve your training objectives and ensure higher retention and completion rates.
What’s Microlearning?
Microlearning refers to learning content delivered in bite-sized bursts, delivering specific pieces of content rather than broad subject overviews. It can come in various formats, including PDFs, explainer videos, and infographics.
The common denominator among these content types is that they should be brief and impactful, allowing you to meet learning needs promptly and precisely. The instruction needs to be stand-alone, and the experience is not meant to last beyond a few minutes.
Brasstacks aims to make the microlearning content even more accessible by reaching the employees through SMS. So they can learn at their own pace and time.
Karl Kapp and Robyn Defelice defined Microlearning as an instructional unit that provides an intuitive engagement in an activity intentionally designed to elicit a specific response from the participant.
Train Employees at their Pace
The value of microlearning is subdued when there's limited learner engagement. Brasstacks aims to optimize your training by minimizing the barriers to learning. It directly reaches the target audience through their smartphones with interactive prompts and easy-to-complete training modules. So, employees can complete their training anywhere, anytime.
When your learners are looking for quick troubleshooting guides to resolve a problem, they need to be able to grasp the concept and get back to work. In most cases, they don't have time to match visual elements with text or to drag and drop words.
You can, however, help them by introducing bite-sized learning modules delivered to their smartphones with Brasstacks. It will help them draw their conclusion from the training, ensuring the answer will stick better in their memory.
How to develop an effective microlearning module? [Quick Guide]
Are you wondering how to develop an effective micro-learning course? Well, here are some guidelines that can help you design your personalized micro-learning course according to training needs to maximize the impact.
1. Set your Priorities (aka Learning Objectives)
Microlearning modules should help facilitate a specific outcome. In most cases, this means you'll have one learning objective per module. Don't try to squeeze everything into a series of five-minute chunks or SMSs (this is NOT micro-learning).
A true piece of microlearning is designed intentionally and aims to achieve only one objective, not a bunch of them. Brasstacks has many pre-made courses that prioritize employee learning with focused and targeted micro-learning. View our courses.
2. Know your Audience
Traditionally, the training companies used to develop generalized training content for companies without studying the demographics and context. However, microlearning should focus on understanding the learner profile to help them in the best possible way.
At Brasstacks, we have meticulously studied the background of our target audience, under which circumstances the learner will turn to microlearning content, and how it can benefit them with utmost convenience.
3. Keep it Bite-Sized
Microlearning is, by definition, concise. However, many instructional designers wonder how short it should be. Research has shown that effective microlearning content lasts between two and seven minutes. The reason is, nowadays the attention span of the learners is declining, and they don't make it through the entirety of learning content, even if it's just a few minutes long.
Bearing this in mind, when creating microlearning content, it's still worth making sure your learners can easily skim the content and develop clear takeaways. It is particularly useful in compliance training as your employees can immediately apply their learning once they've completed their course. Moreover, to motivate the learners, Brasstacks also provides a completion certificate to accredit their efforts.
4. Make it Relatable
When diving into an unfamiliar subject, learners benefit from having examples they can relate to and draw conclusions from. To ensure the examples you include are relatable, consider real-world scenarios that learners are likely to encounter on the job.
It will help them in applying their learnings to their own experiences, but can also strengthen their knowledge retention. At Brasstacks, we have kept it relatable, bite-sized, and convenient. Our courses are designed to help the learner easily navigate their journey and make the training process easier.
5. Keep an Active and Relatable Tone
Using a conversational tone that communicates in the same way learners do in their everyday lives can also enhance relatability. When developing a microlearning course, use an active voice to ensure your content gets the point across promptly and clearly. It enables your learners to develop better conclusions and bridge the knowledge gaps.
Microlearning Examples for Different Learning Objectives
Every company has a different approach when it comes to training and development. It is adapted as per the needs analysis. However, to help you, we have shortlisted different instances where you can use the microlearning courses for extensive learning and impactful results.
✅ Reinforce a Learning Event
Training professionals often complain that despite thousands of dollars invested in the training, the team is unable to retain the learning and implement it in the business context. Here’s where you can use microlearning to reiterate the training material. It is a very common scenario for microlearning. You can use the following ideas to reinforce learning through the Brasstacks LMS:
- Enhance your existing training module, webinar, or any instructor-led experience with follow-ups and reminders. Share practice exercises and re-introduce the concept to increase retention.
- Recap the acquired knowledge by delivering a five-minute walkthrough. Learners need to be reminded to apply their new skills.
- Develop warm-ups before training sessions to balance the knowledge among the participants and/or to engage the learners.
- Create follow-up courses to ensure that learners have memorized the compliance-related SOPs. Brasstacks offers many pre-made compliance-related courses, such as HIPAA training and many more.
✅ Introduce Skill-based Training
Microlearning modules could be a great help to improve employees' performance daily, especially via mobile learning. It empowers them to learn at their own pace and time.
Brasstacks offers many skills-related courses to ensure high-quality care and patient well-being, such as Over-the-counter medication courses, injury prevention for caregivers, and many more. However, microlearning can be used in many other contexts as well, such as:
- Develop a bite-sized asset for the sales team on how to handle customer complaints.
- Create a simple explainer on how to accomplish a task through advanced software.
- Create a refresher course or cheat sheet that caregivers can use to manage a specific healthcare problem.
- Use this in instances when the employee doesn’t have time to go through an hour-long webinar but is happy to learn a helpful bit of knowledge through mobile, on-the-go courses.
To ensure maximum impact, ensure that the concept you aim to deliver is specific and resolves a singular issue. For instance, you should not use a microlearning course to deliver complex technical employee training or intricate concepts when complicated analysis or in-depth study is required.
Also, ensure that the instructional designer can realistically break the courses down into standalone pieces. Forcing someone to go through a microlearning version of a course originally designed for a longer, more comprehensive format contributes to disaster.
The solution to this problem is creating longer training and then providing short microlearning exercises to ascertain understanding and help with knowledge transfer.
✅ Provide Performance Report
Use bite-sized courses to help your learners complete the job and provide support in moments of urgency - this is where microlearning stands out.
Think of something very practical and targeted: job aids, SOPs, guides, and instructions, such as Food Safety or Fall Prevention. The employees might turn to Brasstack's readily available and easy-to-complete courses when they don't know how to complete a task or need a quick run-through of the best practices. Brasstacks SMS microlearning system ensures that the frontline workers get everything they need at their fingertips.
In the case of an emergency, just keep in mind that your learner won’t have time for loads of interactivity or detail - they need to swiftly learn the concept and get back to their work. Therefore, you can use our pre-made courses that are designed to optimize employees’ learning experience.
✅ Prototype eLearning
Microlearning courses are indispensable when prototyping conventional e-learning modules. Why dive into designing a detailed, full-fledged learning piece when you can start small? Presenting a prototype to stakeholders can save instructional designers and eLearning developers hours (or even weeks) of work. Moreover, you can organize a dry run of the program and use the learners' feedback to build the complete module.
The challenge in this approach is to keep prototyping fast in production without compromising its quality and design. To make an impression and to get valid results from your experiment, your eLearning sample should be visually appealing as well. Not every tool or e-learning Platform is capable of offering you such creative liberty. But Brasstacks does, you can create the prototype modules with us.
Wrapping it Up
Microlearning is an effective way to learn and develop workforce capacity in our fast-paced, tech-driven world. It offers bite-sized, easy-to-understand learning modules that fit the transient attention span of today's learners and retain more knowledge. The following blog covered many aspects of how to create an effective microlearning module and capitalize on it to boost employee performance.
Using strategies like focusing on individual learning objectives and optimizing for mobile devices and different content formats, you can create powerful learning experiences for your teams.
HR visionaries worldwide are leveraging microlearning for skills development, interactive diagnostics, onboarding, and expert training. It empowers you to give employees access to learning content anywhere, anytime through mobile, and that amplifies the impact of your learning program.
According to workplace learning trends, microlearning will be a crucial contributor to employee development. Growth culture is key - microlearning with Brasstacks is the stepping stone to take talent development in your team to new heights.
FAQs
What is microlearning?
Microlearning is bite-sized content delivered in 2-10 minute chunks. It is developed to facilitate the learning process with utmost convenience. Brasstacks is committed to offering the best microlearning courses to develop your team’s capacity.
How can microlearning enhance the training experience?
There are many benefits of microlearning, including but not limited to higher knowledge retention, learner engagement, flexible learning to meet individual needs, enhanced productivity, and self-paced learning.
What are the challenges of microlearning?
Microlearning also poses some challenges, such as handling large content, simplifying intricate content, ensuring consistency across different learning modules, and adapting it to the modern learner. To deploy microlearning, you must plan carefully and consider these aspects to get great results.
How do I develop engaging microlearning content?
To create microlearning content, you must first know your learners and their training needs and have clear learning objectives. You must use relatable examples to resonate with them, including interactive elements and easy-to-read texts. With Brasstacks' conversational tone and high-quality content, you can redefine the microlearning process and training endeavors.
Ready to transform your training approach with microlearning? Dive into our extensive library of courses at Brasstacks and empower your team to learn on the go. View our case study on how CareWorks Health Services used SMS-based microlearning and got 87% of its employees to complete training.
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