Stine Snekkenes is Motimate Creative Studio’s trained pedagogist and resident expert in the method and practice of creating online courses. Her experience working with diverse organizations has proven just how important well-thought-out design and communication is in creating successful online learning. Stine has made it her mission to help learning teams everywhere design and deliver the best learning content that they possibly can.

What is micro-learning?

Micro-learning, or nano-learning, describes the practice of providing learners with short, focused units of learning content. The idea is to break content up into short lessons, focused on individual morsels of information, to make it more easily absorbed by learners.

Micro-learning has rapidly gained traction in organizational learning because it works in synergy with people’s busy schedules. It can be difficult to take time out of our working lives to dedicate to learning new skills and absorbing information that is important to our jobs. Micro-learning helps us to learn in short bursts so that we can learn faster – whilst we are commuting or during other moments of pause in our day. It also helps us to learn as we perform work tasks, so that we can apply the information in real-time, a concept known as learning in the flow of work. 

What does it mean for your learning content? 

We are used to digesting information on-demand, on our mobile phones. Micro-learning is a useful approach to creating content that works on a mobile phone.

At Motimate Creative Studio, there are a key set of principles that we apply when creating strong micro-learning content. I’m going to tell you what these are and how they work…

Break it up

Divide content up into individual content blocks. Assign just one key lesson per block. Dividing information up into manageable chunks helps learners digest and remember the information. 

Keep it short

Use short sentences. Make a single point in each sentence. Don’t use extra words.  

Use visuals

Imagery and graphics help punctuate word-heavy content, helping to break it up and bring it to life. They are also a useful tool for conveying messages and concepts faster and with fewer words.

Mix up your formats 

Applying alternative formats to content blocks helps make the learning more engaging by stimulating alternative parts of our brain, helping to make the information more memorable. Duller subjects can be made more engaging by using alternative formats to text, for example:

  • Video
  • Photographs
  • Infographics
  • Animations
  • Quizzes

So, how does this transform the learning content? Here’s how we, at Motimate Creative Studio applied Micro-learning principles to communicate important messaging about cyber security to our customers.

Cyber security is of great importance, but when we are busy, we do not always pay as much attention to the risks as we should. At Motimate Creative Studio, we took a long piece of text about how to offset the risks of cyber-crime and turned it into something intensely more engaging and memorable delivering far greater benefit to Motimate’s users.  

The difference is obvious at-a-glance. The first is simply paragraphs of black and white text. The second is colorful, visual, and presented in sections. Which course would you rather follow?

Before

After

 Here’s how we did it in 5 steps . . .

  1. We kick-started the course with a set of direct questions to set clear objectives and map out a learning path, so the learner immediately knows what they will achieve by completing the course. 

2. Cyber-security can be a bit of a dry subject, so we used an animated video to introduce the topic and engage learners with the course. 

3. We divided information into easy-to-digest chunks with a dedicated section for each element of the module – delivering just one learning point at a time.

4. We also broke the text up, using short sentences to convey meaning and punctuating it with visually stimulating colorful graphics.

5. And we made it interactive, putting the individual in control of their own learning. We did this by including two buttons, requiring two separate actions at the end of every section:

1.    Validate completion of the section with a slider button 

2.    Actively select ‘Next’ to move to the next session.

Here’s what that looks like:

If you would like to find out more about how you can revolutionize your learning assets and create really engaging courses using micro-learning, get in touch with the team at Motimate Creative Studio today.