How to plan your microlearning lessons
Online courses are becoming more and more popular thanks to the flexibility, accessibility and convenience they offer. However, traditional online courses can be tiring for learners when lessons run 10, 20 or 60 minutes.
Microlearning lessons offer an alternative by covering individual topics or modules within a course in a short, easy-to-understand way. A microlearning lesson usually lasts between 1 and 7 minutes, with just enough information to help users reach their learning goal.
In this lesson, we'll detail how you can plan your own microlearning lessons for your next online course!
Let's get started.
The first thing is to identify the objective of the lesson. Write your learning objectives in clear but short sentences, using Bloom's taxonomy. I won't go into it here, but it's a framework for writing learning objectives.
Usually, one to three learning objectives are more than enough for up to 7 minutes of content, or 1,050 words. The average speaking rate is 140 to 150 words per minute.
One of the ideas behind microlearning is that each piece of content should be "consumed" on its own, meaning it doesn't require a previous lesson to be understood. If it does, remember to state that at the beginning of your lesson. As usual, give a quick recap of the knowledge your learners should recall for your lesson.
One of the traps inexperienced instructional designers fall into is forgetting to connect all the lessons, simply because they are supposed to work as independent lessons. Don't forget to tie them all together in a sequence of microlearning lessons, in a way that each one contributes to a higher-level knowledge.
Steps in creating microlearning lessons
The main takeaway here is that you can plan microlearning lessons by breaking your macro learning goal into small pieces.
- Define the problem before starting on a solution.
- Setting goals before you begin is an important step in planning microlearning lessons.
- Be ambitious with your content, but be realistic! Create bold objectives for your course. Microlearning doesn't mean superficial. You can really create high-level content. Just don't put everything in one lesson or module.
So now you know how to plan your microlearning lessons. But how do you adapt learning tools and objects to the microlearning technique?
In the next lessons, we'll cover several types of content and how to adapt them to shorter versions without oversimplifying them.
