Understanding the realities of e-Learning and virtual training are more important now than ever before. Many companies have employees working remotely for the foreseeable future, and that means you need to train employees in a way that’s going to maximize your return on investment and ensure engagement and productivity.
The digital learning ecosystem is evolving rapidly, particularly now. Digital learning is no longer dependent on videos and assessments alone. Instead, there are elements such as social connection, digital content, and even virtual reality.
There’s also the concept of bite-sized learning that’s important for employers to have a grasp of, to ensure their training is effective and compelling.
Learning more about bite-sized learning can also be valuable because it can be applied to your marketing content.
What Is Bite-Sized Learning?
Bite-sized learning is sometimes also referred to as microlearning.
The idea is that you’re providing brief, but very focused content. The content centers on a single problem or topic.
The learner gets just the content directly related to the specific objective at hand. Bite-sized learning is well-suited to corporate training, adult learning, and different learning styles.
Research has found that most adults learn best when they have a curriculum that’s driven by experience and problem-solving.
The adult learner wants to be given the exact information they need at any given time, instead of going through lengthy learning they see as irrelevant.
Bite-sized learning can come in different formats.
For example, it might mean watching a brief video or reading one short article.
What Are the Benefits of Bite-Sized Learning?
Some of the benefits of bite-sized learning include:
- It’s faster for employees to learn new concepts and skills, and they can also retain them and put them to use faster. With bite-sized learning, you don’t have to dedicate so much time to training, which in the traditional sense can mean lost work time. Instead, employees can learn what they need to know without taking much time away from their workday, making it good for productivity.
- There tends to be a high level of quality with bite-sized learning. This is because the focus is entirely on bringing to learners only what’s most relevant.
- Of course, bite-sized learning is flexible so it can meet the needs of all employees, regardless of how different they may be.
- Engagement is one of the biggest issues many employers face when it comes to training content. Research has found that shorter snippets of learning are much better for psychological engagement than longer content. It reduces burnout, and employees can carefully process what they’re learning instead of rushing through it.
- There’s a science behind bite-sized content. For example, based on Information Process Theory, our attention span and short-term memory can only retain so much in a period of time. Breaking it up into small chunks is optimal for information processing.
- Using bite-sized content can create a culture of learning. Learners can access this content from anywhere and at any time and they don’t have to wade through so much unnecessary information, so it can be more compelling for them to continue learning. They’re learning on a time-sensitive, need-to-know basis.
Tips for Creating Bite-Sized eLearning
When you’re creating employee training content, you want to focus on one subject, and even within that subject, drill down to be as specific as possible.
Think about the moment of need for the people who will be accessing the content. The goal should be to provide your employees with the information they need at the time they need it.
For example, think about creating content for your sales staff that they can quickly access from their mobile device on the sales floor.
You should also conduct an analysis of skills gaps regularly so you’re not wasting time on content that’s not needed by your employees. You want bite-sized learning to effectively fill in those skills and performance gaps.
You can also include assessments in bite-sized and microlearning, just as you would with traditional learning. Just make sure that the assessments aren’t overly complex or time-consuming.
Finally, use different formats so that your employees can find what’s most in-line with their learning style.
Maybe you include games and quizzes, videos, and brief screencasts in addition to written bite-sized content. Since you don’t have to put as much time into each lesson, you have more opportunities to deliver variety that will resonate across the board for all of your employees.
Bite-sized learning has the potential to revolutionize corporate training, and eLearning is the platform to facilitate it.