Microlearning is one of the most recent trends sweeping through the corporate eLearning landscape like wildfire, and much has been written about what it is and isn’t, as well as how to do it (see  Microlearning Essentials: The What and Why).

Given its ubiquity, however, finding case studies of microlearning in action is not as easy as one might think. Scouring the Internet does yield some results, but only after filtering out all the generic information about why it’s a trend to begin with. Because microlearning is still a very new addition to corporate eLearning, most of the microlearning examples featured in this article come from vendors hired by companies to bring microlearning into their workplaces.

Microlearning Examples from Axonify: Walmart, Bloomingdale’s, At Home

Axonify is a Canadian corporate eLearning vendor that describes itself as an employee knowledge platform designed to deliver employees the knowledge they need to make a positive impact on the companies where they work. Here are three Microlearning examples from Axonify:

Walmart. Being one of the largest distribution networks in the world that moves millions of products all over the globe brings up serious safety challenges. Walmart’s goal was to find a way of creating a safety culture to decrease risks, accidents and injuries and their associated costs. After all, even just a 5% reduction in recordable safety incidents would save millions. Walmart worked with Axonify to create a microlearning program that would not only improve employee knowledge and retention regarding safety practices, but also be so engaging that it would keep safety front-and-center in the minds of workers.

The Axonify solution was implemented in 150+ distribution centers throughout the US where it was made available to 75,000+ employees. At any point during their shift, workers can log on to the Axonify platform and spend 3-5 minutes playing a game that involves answering safety questions. The system gives instant feedback and remembers responses, allowing workers to not only immediately see where they need improvement, but also reinforcing the knowledge they already have.

The gamification aspect lets them know where they’re at both in terms of their individual progress but also relative to their peers for friendly competition. Employees are observed on-the-job to see how knowledge is being applied, and when this performance data is entered into Axonify, training is adjusted for each employee based on what they need.

Not only do employees love the system (as shown by a voluntary participation rate averaging 91%), the results achieved have been dramatic, with a 54% decrease in recordable safety incidents in distribution centers stemming from a 15% increase in employee knowledge about safety topics (source).

Bloomingdale’s. The Walmart experience was so profoundly positive that Axonify had the opportunity for a similar project with retailer Bloomingdale’s. Similar goals included providing engaging safety training to 10,000 employees in 12 states. The solution was delivering bursts of training in 3-5 minute sessions on a wide array of topics such as safely using ladders, cleaning up broken glass, and how to correctly use box cutters.

Employees can access a session at any time during a shift through tablets or the POS system while they’re out on the floor. Once again, Axonify’s engaging, gamified approach led to voluntary employee participation rates of 90% and their belief that the information boosts their job confidence (86.6%) and prevents accidents (83%). Business results were once again dramatic, with a 41% reduction in safety claims that saved Bloomingdale’s $10 million (source).

At Home. Home décor retailer At Home knew it needed a massive employee training makeover. After all, the sum total of training in the past consisted of giving employees a handbook requiring only an electronic signature to prove they had received it.

Working with Axonify, gamified microlearning was applied to a wide array of training needs, including onboarding, safety, customer service, compliance and even leadership training. The Axonify platform now delivers all this training to 3,000+ employees across 100 stores in 28 states in short bursts that can be completed in just a few minutes each day. And as with the previous examples, the solution’s adaptive algorithm is constantly closing knowledge gaps by automatically reinforcing those topics where an individual associate needs extra help.

The gamified microlearning approach is working well for At Home, with onboarding time reduced by 90%, a 36% reduction in safety incidents, and company-wide trainings accomplished in four weeks (and sometimes less than that) instead of six months, all without any field support whatsoever (source).

Microlearning Examples from Grovo: IHG, Magellan Health, Asurint

Founded in 2010, Grovo is one of the “new kids on the block” in terms of providing solutions for corporate eLearning. Grovo specializes in bite-sized video lessons based on its proprietary microlearning method to teach employees the new skills they need to thrive in rapidly changing workplaces. Here are three microlearning examples from Grovo:

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG). Faced with constant and rapid evolution in customer service requests among its 5,000+ hotels all over the world, IHG needed a new kind of training that could keep pace with the increasing complexity of customer requests. The company previously relied upon periodic classroom training, but Grovo introduced its short, compelling microlearning lessons accessible to reps on any device at any time. The bite-sized trainings are working well for IHG customer service reps and training managers alike, who are more inspired to promote the overall learning culture at IHG. Within just two days of launching the new system, IHG learners in five countries had accessed more than 5,500 lessons. Onboarding time has been reduced from five weeks to just two weeks, and employees are getting higher scores on knowledge tests after training (source).

Magellan Health. For a managed healthcare company that prides itself on the effort it puts into leadership and professional development opportunities for its workers, the Magellan Health Talent Department was feeling more than a little frustrated that only 80 out of 6,900 employees had bothered to access the company’s online learning platform over the course of an entire year. Curating relevant content from Grovo’s extensive microlearning library and promoting it among the workforce proved to be an effective solution. Training participation quickly jumped by 80%, with an average of 2,000 lessons viewed each month and 700 employees trained in less than six months. And once engaged with the system, employees are routinely engaging in more training than assigned or required (source).

Asurint. As a high-growth, full-service background screening company for employers through next-gen technologies, Asurint began to employ a large number of Millenials. The growing number of the demo in Asurint’s workforce needed a 21^st century solution for onboarding, new hire training, and professional development, and even more so given its high-volume industry requiring everyone to maintain high levels of productivity.

Grovo’s microlearning solution is utilized throughout an employee’s time at Asurint, including all the initial requirements around onboarding, compliance, data security, industry-specific regulations, and HR training. After that, employees can access whatever lessons they want in order to reach their own professional goals.

Training time for new hires to the sales team was reduced from 6-8 weeks down to 4 weeks and sales team new hires retention increased by 100%. In addition, more than 25% of the lessons viewed are self-directed rather than assigned, which means employees are proactively taking control of their own professional development (source).

Microlearning Examples from Unboxed: NextWorth and Berkhsire Hathaway

Unboxed Technology is a corporate eLearning vendor offering a variety of training solutions along with a learning management system called Spoke. Here are two microlearning examples from Unboxed:

NextWorth. This Boston-based company makes recycling electronics as easy as possible for anyone by purchasing them from consumers. After getting a quote online, consumers then had to ship their electronics to the company.

In a bid to make the process even easier, NextWorth wanted to use brick-and-mortar retail partners such as Target so customers could deliver their electronics more conveniently. A designated Target employee can inspect the device, give a quote and pay the customer with a Target gift card.

But NextWorth quickly discovered that a lack of clarity at retail partnered was leading to inconsistent customer experiences and lost revenue dollars. New training was needed for hundreds of associates on how to do more accurate product trade-ins.

Unboxed helped revamp the NextWorth user interface to make it as easy as possible and then rolled out a series of short training videos about how the trade-in program works, its benefits, and how to provide good customer experiences. Within two weeks, variance among retail partners was reduced by half, and trade-in accuracy eventually showed double-digit improvement (source).

Berkshire Hathaway Media Group (BH Media). With more than 30 daily and 70 weekly newspapers under its management, BH Media was dealing with huge variation in operations, processes and cultures across the various papers. It needed a way to offer unified training to all the sales professionals at the various sites.

Unboxed created a unified sales methodology and the microlearning-based onboard training needed to implement it. The reaction among the sales teams of this incredibly diverse collection of newspapers has been overwhelmingly positive, with fully 98% of participants agreeing or strongly agreeing that the content was not only useful, but was also immediately applicable in their daily work (source).

The common threads running through many of these microlearning examples include the “just-in-time” aspect of accessing what is needed when it’s needed, the ease of fitting it in when the sessions last for only a few minutes at a time, and gamification that drives engagement – all of which result in greater satisfaction among employees about the training they receive, and good feelings in the c-suite about the positive impacts on the company’s bottom line.

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Buzzwords come and buzzwords go with alarming frequency, but there are always some that end up sticking around for the long haul. Microlearning is definitely one of the hottest buzzwords in the eLearning industry, but will it make the cut for the long haul? Answers to the three questions posed in this article will shed some light on the topic microlearning essentials for learning and development professionals wondering whether or not they should jump onto the microlearning bandwagon.

1. Microlearning is Just Another Passing Fad, Right?

Wrong! Microlearning essentials begin with an understanding of why it is here to stay. There are several reasons, but none of them have anything to with humans now having shorter attention spans than the average goldfish (the answer to question 2 below debunks this pervasive myth). The primary reason microlearning is on the rise has to do with Millennials, now the largest living generation that is quickly becoming the largest percentage of the workforce as well. Microlearning works for Millennials because it fits with how they consume all kinds of digital media and information – in bite-sized chunks. But it’s not because they’re unable to focus their attention for longer periods of time; only that they’ve gotten used to smaller bits. But as it turns out, microlearning also works because it can be extremely effective. One recent study by Germany’s Dresden University of Technology noted that smaller chunks of content result in much better information retention across such aspects as overall comprehension, time taken to answer assessment questions, and amount of review needed. Combining all three aspects, microlearners did 22% better than longer-form learners.

2. Is Microlearning Needed Because of Shorter Attention Spans?

Short answer: No. This one is a little tricky, however, and requires a bit of explanation. Yes, you’ll find plenty of articles out there on the Internet that say microlearning is needed because of how short the human attention span has become in recent years. The “Goldfish Myth” states that the average human attention span is now just 8 seconds, which is less than the average attention of a goldfish, which supposedly clocks in at 9 seconds. Sounds compelling, but it’s not backed by scientific evidence.

The source of this latest iteration of the Goldfish Myth can be attributed to a Microsoft report published in 2015 called How Does Digital Affect Canadian Attention Spans? Keep in mind that the report (which can’t even be found online anymore) doesn’t have any author names, was not peer-reviewed, and was funded by an advertising office with a vested interested in grabbing people’s attention. It was based on research conducted by the Consumer Insights team at Microsoft Canada and included a survey administered to 2,000 Canadians as well as electroencephalogram (EEG) brain activity data collected from 112 people. Based on an analysis of this data, one of the conclusions reached in the report is this:

The study found early tech adopters and heavy social media users have more “intermittent bursts” of high attention. They’re better at identifying what they want/don’t want and need less to process and commit things to memory (source).

As previously mentioned, the general idea of microlearning is a good fit for tech-savvy digital natives like Millennials. The data did not reveal anything more specific about attention span, nor did it address the attention spans of goldfish. The report did, however, include the following graphic on page 6:

But these claims are not based on the research findings from Microsoft. The only citation given is Statistic Brain. Diving down the proverbial rabbit hole, the Statistic Brain website has a page of Attention Span Statistics that shows the following:

The first two sources listed sound promising, but the third is the Associate Press, and a news agency is rarely a good primary source. But none of them are hyperlinked, so they can’t even be verified. Digging further leads nowhere. There is literally no real scientific evidence to back up the claims. And just think about it – if our attention spans really were that short, how in the world could ever get anything done?

There is a much wider consensus, however, that humans do have a hard time sustaining focused attention on something for longer than 20 minutes. And we do that all the time as well. It’s easier to do, of course, when you like what you’re doing, but even when it’s something you have to do, you can hit the “reset” button on your attention span by taking a quick break and then coming back to the task. That’s the idea behind the Pomodoro Technique. Microlearning essentials take this idea to the next level by further shortening the length of time spent on any given learning resource or asset.

3. What Characteristics Define Microlearning Essentials?

Any attempt to adequately define microlearning essentials is difficult because there is no widespread consensus among learning professionals about what qualifies, so it does feel like a moving target. However, sifting through the best information sources out there does result in some common threads as described below:

Asset Duration. Some will say a microlearning asset should be less than five minutes while others say 5-10 minutes and yet others will say less than 15 minutes. Rather than focusing on trying to create some kind of hard-and-fast rule, it’s better to think in terms of “as long as necessary” or “right-sized” for the audience, content and learning objective. There is always going to be a need for longer courses and modules, but what microlearning challenges eLearning professionals to do is really break something down into the smallest core elements as possible. Take a 30-minute compliance course and break it down into 3 five-minute assets and suddenly people can grab each session whenever they have five minutes to spare. That’s microlearning in action.

One Learning Objective per Asset. Because the goal is the shortest duration possible, each asset can only address one objective. For a traditional course, there is usually a terminal objective, the big picture of what learners should be able to do or know at the end, as well as a bunch of smaller enabling objectives of specific skills that get them there. A microlearning asset must only address one enabling objective, and even those may need to be broken down into smaller objectives. Any time you can break an enabling objective down further, the better it will fit within microlearning essentials.

Accessibility. Millennials are especially vocal about wanting to have more control over what they learn and when they learn it, and microlearning has the potential to do exactly that. It needs to be easy to find and accessible from any type of device from desktops to laptops to tablets to phones and even wearables (watches, glasses, etc.). In essence, this is a significant shift towards a “pull” model as opposed to the more traditional “push” model of getting learning content out to learners. Instead, employees will pull in what they need to their device of choice when they need it, which means it needs to be as accessible as a conducting a quick Google search.

Interactivity. Traditional long-form approaches overload learners with content, which gets in the way of them interacting with the material. There’s no room for doing anything active with the content that would help learners make it their own and retain it because the goal is to keep plowing through all that material, thereby divorcing it from its application context.

Relevance. The best microlearning happens when a person encounters a problem or question and can immediately pull in a microlearning asset that addresses their issue. This can be thought of as “just-in-time” learning. And if the asset needed doesn’t exist, the company learning department should be able to create it quickly and efficiently. After all, it only needs to be a matter of minutes in terms of duration. But just because it’s short doesn’t mean it’s not a complete learning moment or cycle. When designed correctly, a microlearning asset is a bite-sized, highly relevant bit of learning content that can be immediately applied.

Microlearning essentials must begin with a better understanding of the what and why of microlearning. Microlearning is not a passing fad. If anything, it may well become the dominant form of learning, training and development as Millennials continue their rise as a percentage of the overall workforce. And the fact that the next generation won’t be any less digitally connected than Millennials also serves to reinforce the growth in microlearning, at least on topics where it makes sense. Just remember that microlearning works not because attention spans are shrinking, but because it’s an effective way to engage the way more and more people think and learn best.

Featured Image: Nordwood Themes, Unsplash.

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