Sometimes designing corporate training can feel like trying to shove an elaborate, three-tiered wedding cake into a teeny tiny lunchbox. You have all this compliance data, leadership philosophies, and technical jargon you want to teach, but your learners only have so much bandwidth between meetings and projects to take it in. If you try to force the whole proverbial cake in their faces at once, you’ll be left with a yucky, incomprehensible mess. And in this modern learning and development environment, we need to stop trying to shove cakes down people's throats and pivot to Jolly Ranchers.
In a recent webinar, Stop Shrinking, Start Converting: Practical Strategies for Microlearning Design, Dr. Robyn Defelice, a renowned learning strategist and author of Maximizing the Power of Microlearning, suggested that the most effective training isn’t just shrunken down—it’s distilled.
Much like those yummy, classic Jolly Ranchers, great microlearning is small and long-lasting in its impact, but highly concentrated. It provides a steady, craveable flavor of knowledge that is easy to process. To make the transition from bulky cake to concentrated candy, you have to understand the science of how people learn.
The cognitive load (aka, managing the mental sugar rush)
When we design microlearning, we are essentially managing a learner's cognitive load. Think of the brain as a countertop with limited space. If you clutter it with too many ingredients and utensils at one time, the learner gets overwhelmed and checks out. There are three types of cognitive loads:
- Intrinsic load. This is the complexity of the content itself. Some topics, like brain surgery or high-level leadership, take time to dissolve.
- Germaine load. This is the effort one expends when they exert the mental energy necessary to make sense of something.
- Extraneous load. These are the distractions that often take the form of unnecessary animations, fluffy company histories, and clunky navigation that detract from the learning process.
The goal in microlearning is to clear the countertop of cognitive clutter so the learner can focus entirely on the Jolly Rancher in front of them.
Keep it brief and bold
A common misconception in microlearning is the belief that you can take a 60-minute workshop and literally chop it into 12, five-minute videos. But when you do that, what you’ve actually created is 12 confusing, ineffective, short videos. Like little, small, surprisingly unsatisfying pieces of cake.
To achieve true concision, you have to ensure the content is both brief and meaningful. If you remove a piece of content, would it impact the learner’s ability to perform the task? If the answer is no, then that content isn’t relevant. Cut it.
Here’s the keep-or-cut litmus test. When converting long-form content into microlearning, ask yourself these three questions:
- Does this directly support the specific learning objective?
- Is this information essential for the desired performance outcome?
- If I remove this, will the learner fail to achieve the goal?
If you find yourself including nice-to-know history or repetitive examples, you are increasing the extraneous load. By ruthlessly paring down the information, you leave ample room for the most pertinent information to shine and for learning to take place.
How to build a microlearning campaign
Microlearning shouldn’t always be a one-off event. Think of it as a complete, yet distinct vehicle for behavioral change. Instead of one grueling annual compliance training, for example, a campaign might look like:
- Month one. A two-minute hook video on why data privacy matters.
- Month two. A quick interactive scenario on identifying personally identifiable information (PII).
- Month three. A check-in quiz on who to contact in the event of a breach.
By pulsing these candy-sized pieces of knowledge throughout the year, you reinforce the learning and ensure it sticks, rather than letting it be forgotten two weeks (or less) after a long, boring seminar or training session.
The secret to a successful microlearning strategy lies in the tools you use to build it. You need a platform that allows you to be agile. MicroBuilder® is designed specifically for this purpose. It’s an intuitive authoring tool that helps you create high-impact, mobile-ready microlearning modules in minutes. With built-in AI features, you can easily draft content and work into a modular design that’s easy to modify and keep relevant. It’s the ideal tool for an L&D pro looking to sweeten their training and their ROI.
Check out the full webinar below to see how Dr. Defelice broke all this down. And if you’d like to try MicroBuilder yourself, start your free trial here.
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Disclaimer: The ideas, perspectives, and strategies shared in this article reflect the expertise of our featured speaker, Robyn A. Defelice, PhD. Be sure to follow her on LinkedIn to explore more of her insights.
