Thinking Big By Training Small

Have you ever provided a training workshop where you had a hard time keeping your participants engaged?

If so, you may have wondered if the cause was your training content/topic, or maybe even your audience. These are valid things to take into account to improve your delivery and provide a more client-focused training experience.

However, have you ever considered how long your training sessions are?

If your day-long training workshops aren’t always getting through to your participants, you may want to consider changing your approach to something more short form.

Research is showing that the human attention span is getting shorter and shorter. So being able to grab your trainee’s attention ASAP is crucial. Getting their attention from start to finish by delivering training content in multiple, shorter periods of time will help optimize retention.

There’s a name for this style of training, it’s called microlearning.

Microlearning is a type of training that involves giving short snippets of information at a time. Instead of a sit-down training session that goes for several hours to a whole day, learners take in new information in a bite-size format.

Below is our quick guide to understanding microlearning, its benefits, and how you can use your training materials as a resource for this style of training.

Benefits to Microlearning

There are many benefits to delivering training in a microlearning format.

Generally, microlearning is done online due to the short form delivery of the content, making it a convenient and flexible way to train.

But don’t be mistaken, just because microlearning is delivered in small time frames, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a big impact. Microlearning has been proven to increase focus and retention by 80%. By presenting trainees with small amounts of content at a time, they won’t feel too overwhelmed with information overload, which will help them remember more. With a shorter period of time needed to take in the content, it is easier for trainees to stay motivated from start to finish.

This type of training is a manageable form of self-study that gives you better results as a trainer and prevents burnout for participants.

Integrate microlearning with our training materials

If you feel that microlearning would better suit your learners, but you don’t know where to start, fear not. There are a number of different ways to adapt our workshop training materials to be compatible with microlearning:

Learning Management System

Our pre-loaded LMS courses have been recently revamped and redesigned to be more modern, more interactive, and more enjoyable to work through. Each course is 10 modules long. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t divide the content to train with a microlearning approach. Ask participants to complete a curated selection of modules to in spread out, shorter chunks of time. This can allow you to provide your trainees with the benefits of microlearning.

Each module ends with a knowledge check of 10 multiple choice questions, a brief quiz that allows for trainees to check their understanding, and a great addition for microlearning. Research has shown that frequent testing doesn’t just measure learning, it actually promotes it. Testing improves recall, retrieving, and the ability to apply new information. This is known as “the testing effect” or “the retrieval practice effect.”

Another perk to microlearning with our LMS? All pre-loaded courses are mobile-friendly, so you know they’ll look great no matter what device your trainees are using.

Workshop Training Library Instructor-Led Training Kits

While microlearning is generally online, there are still ways to use our instructor-led training materials for a microlearning style delivery. Dividing up modules into smaller chunks and prioritizing the most important content you want your trainees to hone in on can allow you to provide a microlearning approach. These condensed versions of our training content can be distributed via email for reading or delivered via virtual instructor-led training using software such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

Our Workshop Training Library gives you more than enough content to develop and implement microlearning programs. Just make sure you condense information carefully to avoid overly fragmenting content. With most of the work done for you, it will be must easier to create smooth microlearning content from it.

Video Companion Kits

Our Video Companion Kits are designed to complement our instructor-led materials. We recommend they are used after presenting content from its corresponding module. Our videos provide a practical example of how the training content could be useful in the workplace. Pairing these with your condensed microlearning content can provide a quick and engaging way to solidify the ideas and topics being covered in the training material. These easy-to-follow video clips help solidify learning objectives in a concise way, which is what microlearning is all about.

Self-Publishing Library

Our self-publishing library allows you as the trainer to offer a vanity published version of any of our training workshops in a soft cover book or e-book. Simply add your name, fill in the about the author section, and include edits and anecdotes to make it your own. This gives you custom training content that is formatted into chapters, making it highly transferrable for microlearning. Simply distribute your books, and assign chapters to read on a consistent, but widely spread, basis. This is a great way to implement microlearning if online learning isn’t ideal for your audience, but you need to provide short-form training.

Conclusion

Sometimes you need to provide a longer form training format. However, it is always good to understand your options and different techniques for delivering training. Knowing the basics of microlearning allows you to make an informed decision on the best way to present your training content.

If your subject matter is high in complexity, microlearning may not be the best option. However, it may still be used as an additional tactic to practice applying knowledge or to check your learner’s understanding.

Knowledge is power, so go forward now knowing a bit more about your training format options.

Have you ever delivered microlearning before? How did it go? Let us know in the comments below!

Posted by Katelyn Roy on June 23, 2022