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Why you should be using microlearning for academies

Why you should be using microlearning for academies

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By offering academies based on micro-learning, 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 you should be using microlearning

The use of mobile devices has in recent years grown beyond predictions, and 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 software 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 are easily accessed and comprehended.

Academies and target groups

The first step when considering an academy should always be the purpose of the 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. In 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 can 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 could be provided 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 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, and hereby increasing their competence level and satisfaction with you as a supplier.

3 – Employee 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 that there are not too many topics included. 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.

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. 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, and some will seek to achieve the highest badge level – and if the results are allowed to be shared, this will be an important part of the gamification effect as well.

​When ready, a version of the learning content is published in the academy, and it is typically made 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 but have to reflect the learning goals of the learning content as a whole. Finally, the learning goals of the academy should be reflected in the learning goals of all the learning content versions included in the academy, ​which the target group has access to.

The content and learning goals

Since the creation of learning content shouldn’t be limited only to L&D, but can be created and provided by several other professionals from the organization, like sales and marketing, quality compliance and security officers, and so on, 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 learning content

Before the learning content is created, the learning goal or goals of each learning content has to be defined – 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, it is time to start creating the videos, and questions for practice sessions and tests. 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.

An Academy example

In this part, we show an example of how a setup of an academy could be implemented. The case is real and is shown anonymously, and the need is relevant for almost all corporations who rely on sales partners to resell their products.

The corporation wanted to provide an 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, 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, with the goal of making it possible for the salespeople to know and understand the key product features and unique selling points of the product. This should make it possible for the salespeople to promote the product when they are in the actual sales situation with a customer.

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

The 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, a competition/sales certification is also published as part of the campaign. Each learning content version should include one video, which of course should be of short length, and 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 is added in 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 using a PC, SmartPhone, and Tablet.

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