Three Ways Microlearning is Changing Corporate Training

The number of U. S. colleges is on the decline. In fact, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, new data from the federal government indicates that the number of colleges in the U.S. fell by nearly 6% between the past academic year and the year before. While some of this decline is a result of the Obama-era regulatory crackdown of for-profit universities, a large part of it can also be attributed to the rise of disruptive learning technologies in education and skills training:

“… an increased number of upstart educational programs [are] serving students with online learning in shorter bursts throughout people’s lives.”

What the author is talking about is microlearning – the methodology that delivers learning in small, specific bursts. Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCS) and microlearning providers allow students to learn whatever they want to know whenever they want to know it. This freedom is changing the game in education.

The disruption of microlearning isn’t only applicable to the education industry. Here are three ways that microlearning is changing corporate training, as well:

1. Ensuring that Learners Can Apply the Training – When microlearning is coupled with a competency-based learning model, it becomes an incredibly effective tool for helping learners achieve confident mastery of new skills. This approach keeps learners engaged and motivated, and ensures that they can actually apply the information they’ve learned in training.

2. Managing Corporate Risk Through Targeted Remediation – Advanced learning technologies can pinpoint where learners are struggling and use predictive analytics to determine similar inflection points across the course as a whole. Once a company knows where its most critical knowledge gaps are, microlearning is the perfect tool for remediating these gaps. As a result companies know where to spend their time and budget, and can easily target areas of high risk with additional training (forestalling mistakes and loss).

3. Reducing Training Times – One of the benefits of microlearning is that it is self-paced. Learners are free to progress through the content at their own stride. In fact, our go-at-your-own-pace approach has been shown to reduce training times by 20-50 percent and get employees back to work (equipped with the knowledge they need) faster than other training methods.

Microlearning isn’t just the wave of the future for the education industry – it also has significant implications for corporate training. When coupled with competency-based learning, predictive analytics and a personalized learning approach, microlearning can have a dramatic impact on training outcomes and budgets.

See how Fulcrum Labs’ learning platform leverages microlearning, or check our our recent blog for more of our thoughts on how microlearning is changing corporate training.