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Why Should You Use Microlearning for Academies?

microlearning academies

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By offering academies based on microlearning, the academies can be launched quickly and be updated rapidly, and hereby support corporations’ ability to provide learning, motivate and act agile and quick, and at the same time have real-time documentation at hand.

Why Should You Use Microlearning Academies?

In recent years, the use of mobile devices has grown beyond predictions. Therefore, corporations need to take into account new ways of training. People not only want to be “trained” – they want to educate themselves and have access to the knowledge they need, when they need or want it, in ways they like and on all the devices they are using.

The quality of content is as important as always. But how it is served, should match how people prefer to learn and what is most effective. Microlearning fulfills both. And has additional benefits for the publisher of the microlearning. They do not have to cost a fortune and using the right virtual training platform, it is easy and fast to create and update.

And why is it so popular? Because of its basic concept – microlearning consists of small bite-sized chunks of learning – topics – that one can easily access and comprehend.

Academies and Target Groups

The first step when considering an academy should always be the purpose of the microlearning academy. It sounds obvious, but in practice, it may become a bit complex and difficult to define. In overall terms, the purpose of the academy should be based on one or several learning goals and the group targeted. This way, an academy typically makes microlearning available:

  • For a specific target group,
  • Within a certain field or
  • A combination

​The academy in itself is a collection of learning content versions. And, if the content is related, represent a learning path or is considered similar to a faculty, comprising one subject area, or a number of related subject areas.

An academy should be for an overall target group such as your customers, users of your products, resellers/sales partners, or employees, and be further segmented. With resellers based on geography, size, products the resellers sell or implement for you, and type of employees – salespeople, sales managers, and project managers, just to name a few examples.

The target group and the learning goals are interdependent on each other since it is a group of people you want to help to reach a certain competence level within a certain field. So, you might see it like these 3 examples:

1- Reseller Academy

Goal: To increase leads and potentially your sales revenue.

To achieve these goals the academy should publish learning content that makes the salespeople, working for your resellers, more knowledgeable about key features and benefits of a specific or several products, thereby increasing their mindshare and becoming better at promoting your products to their customers.

2 – Customer Education Academy

To achieve these goals, the academy should publish learning content that makes users of your products, working for your customers, better at using your products; e.g., software; thereby, increasing their competence level and satisfaction with you as a supplier.

3 – Employee Training Academy

Goal: To reduce amounts of deaths in the workplace.

To achieve these goals the academy should publish learning content that shows which situations could be dangerous, show certain procedures to follow, and how to act when accidents happen, hereby increasing their competence level to avoid and handle dangerous situations. In this last example especially, microlearning can be very effective and fast in creating and distributing important changes if new accidents have just happened to avoid new ones.

The Microlearning Content

The learning content consists of at least one topic, most often several topics. Our recommendation is to not include too many topics. The learner has to be able to grasp everything in one learning content version when they are being tested in their understanding.

Each topic should always only have one video, and the length of each video should not be too long – 3 minutes or less to ensure comprehension. And, we would usually include from a few to 8 topics, not more than 10 topics in one learning content version.

Enhancing Effectiveness

To increase the impact, there should of course also be an interactive practice session for each topic. The questions have to reflect the learning goals for each topic, and the number of questions should be kept low.

In most cases, we recommend that the learning content includes a test, whereby the user can earn a badge or certificate (micro-credentials). To increase the motivation for learning, we like to include multiple passing levels, such as a Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum level. This can positively motivate the learner to continue to understand the topic if they score low. Moreover, some learners will even seek to achieve the highest badge level. Besides, if the results are allowed to be shared, this will be an important part of the gamification effect as well.

​Publishing the Content

Once ready, publish a version of the learning content in the academy. And, make it available for a certain time period to the target group. In most cases, you will at some point in time have to change the content and publish new versions. And if relevant, the learners should be notified if there are new versions. So, they can update their knowledge and certify themselves and get a new badge,

Briefly added up – it is important that the questions for the practice sessions and test reflect the learning goals and content of each topic. The test/certification questions can be the same as the quiz questions or different. However, they must reflect the learning goals of the learning content as a whole. Finally, the learning goals of all the learning content versions should reflect the learning goals of the academy in the academy, ​which the target group can access.

The Content and Learning Goals

The creation of learning content shouldn’t be limited only to L&D. Rather, several other professionals from the organization should be allowed to create and provide the same. These may include people from sales and marketing, quality compliance, security, and so on. Here, we will briefly go through a suggested methodology for creating learning material based on the goals to be reached, shown through a “real” life example.

Creating eLearning Content

Before you create the learning content, define the learning goal or goals of each learning content – what should the learner learn and why? In this way, the author of the learning content can go backward from the goals set. Since you develop microlearning, which includes videos, a good framework would be to create a storyboard divided into the topics covered before you consider producing any videos. The quality of the videos is important. If in poor quality it may very well disturb the learner.

When the topics and their learning goals are well defined, start creating the videos,. Also, include questions for practice sessions and tests to the videos. And as mentioned earlier, we will recommend that you have multiple passing levels, of course, dependent on the number of questions in the test/certification.

A Microlearning Academy Example

In this part, we show an example of how to set up and implement an online learning academy. The case is real and presented anonymously. The need is relevant for almost all corporations that rely on sales partners to resell their products.

The Need for a Microlearning Academy

The corporation wanted to provide a microlearning academy to one of its key resellers with the main focus on one of its most important high-end brands which provide a high contribution margin for both the reseller and the corporation compared to their less expensive products.

Unfortunately, a lot of salespeople often promote less expensive products in the actual sales situation. This is because they often think it is easier to sell based on price.

The corporation and the reseller therefore both had an interest in educating the salespeople. The goal was to make it possible for the salespeople to know and understand the key product features and unique selling points of the product. This should enable the salespeople to promote the product when they are in the actual sales situation with a customer.

The Implementation

They understood that it would take some effort to change the mindset of the sales people. Hence, we came up with the following to fully increase awareness:

The microlearning academy should be active for 2 months, with the launch of one campaign each month. At the end of the 2nd month, the academy hereby would include 2 campaigns. Each campaign should consist of 4 learning content versions – with the launch of one new version each week. When launching the 4th and last learning content version in each campaign, publish a competition/sales certification as part of the campaign. Each learning content version should include one short video. And, the video should include approximately 3 questions for the practice session for the topic.

Microlearning Campaign Plan

In the text the campaign plan would look like this:

Mo 1 – Campaign 1: Launch of the Academy

  • Week 1 – Learning content version 1
  • Week 2 – Learning content version 2
  • Week 3 – Learning content version 3
  • Week 4 – Learning content version 4

Mo 2 – Campaign 2: Addition to the Academy

  • Week 5 – Learning content version 5
  • Week 6 – Learning content version 6
  • Week 7 – Learning content version 7
  • Week 8 – Learning content version 8

Since the target group is working in stores, the invitations to each learning content version and reminders were sent by a combination of notifications, emails, and SMS. And, the learners could access the academy on a personal computer, smartphone, or a tablet.

– uQualio is an award-winning, easy-to-use, all-in-one NextGen LMS software for any types of online video training.