When to use microlearning (and when not to)

Microlearning is a great way to help learners retain information and make the most of their time in the classroom or at home. It's also a great tool for companies that need to train their employees on specific topics or processes.

But there are certain situations where microlearning may not be the best option for your learners or your company. So let's take a look at them now.

In this lesson, we'll talk about when microlearning is most useful and when it isn't.

When you should use microlearning

Microlearning is great for teaching people to do something that is very complicated or requires many steps. Because microlearning happens in small pieces, it makes sense that it works well for this kind of information.

For example, if you're creating an educational course on how to write a resume, breaking each part of the resume into its own module would make sense. It lets you cover all the key components while making sure they are short enough and get enough attention for learners to digest in one session (or several sessions).

Microlearning is also very useful when you want to train several employees at the same time on a new system or on a specific task that requires repetition. It's also great for onboarding new employees into a job with lots of different tasks that need to be done at the same time.

For example, if an instructional designer were creating a course on how to use Excel, they could break it into small pieces where each piece teaches one step at a time. That would make it easier for someone unfamiliar with Excel to learn how to use the program without feeling overwhelmed by all the steps needed to use it.

When not to use microlearning

On the other hand, there are some things microlearning isn't so good for.

For example, if you're trying to teach someone how to write an essay or provide information on a topic they already know well enough, breaking your content into small pieces may not help them understand everything they need to know the way it would if you simply gave them all that information at once.

If you break your content into smaller parts, it can cause confusion, especially if you've never done it before. Yes, it's possible to break complex content into smaller lessons, but it takes practice and intentionality that an inexperienced person may not have.

Also, microlearning doesn't mean squeezing all of your content into a 5-minute video.

There are concepts that will inevitably require 1, 2 or 10 hours of content to teach. Yes, you can explain what astronomy is at a surface level in 2 minutes. But you can't expect to teach someone substantively in that time.

When you cut your content down that way, you're bound to oversimplify and even ignore certain aspects of the subject. And that can cause confusion for your learners down the road.

Finally, don't use microlearning just because it's "cool" or the new educational trend. Microlearning has very specific goals and shouldn't be included just because "our attention spans are shrinking." First of all, our attention spans are not shrinking. Second, you should have a bigger purpose when developing each piece of educational content than just following the latest trend. Microlearning can make learning harder in some respects.

It has its place in any company's learning strategy, but it should be used as part of a larger plan and, possibly, together with other techniques.

In the next lesson, we'll cover the process of creating a course using microlearning principles!