The Microlearning Trend: Accommodating Cultural and Cognitive Shifts by Jeff Fernandez

by Jeff Fernandez

December 1, 2014

“All told, a regimented diet of strict rules and linear learning can over-stuff trainees and leave them feeling bloated and overwhelmed. But by slicing training down into its most essential, wholesome, bite-sized chunks—that best serves a growing population of teaspoon-sized attention spans—I predict the feast of content you prepare for your audience will be far more appetizing.”

You hear it all the time: the millennials are hitting the workforce en masse and they can’t focus, can’t put their phones down, and they have “the attention span of goldfish” (quite literally—Dianne Dukette, MD and David Cornish, MD, doctors at Kaiser Permanente, claim that the continuous human attention span may be as short as eight seconds, while a goldfish seems to have some of us beat at nine). As digital natives fight these stereotypes, it turns out the observations might not be too far off. Attention spans are changing. It’s just not as generational as we might think.

It seems we’re all moving in this direction, and it’s a cultural and cognitive shift: old and young alike are consuming more media than ever before. According to Nielsen, older adults age 50 – 64 upped their daily web video consumption by 72 percent just in the second quarter of 2013. And far from anecdotally, if you compare nearly any movie from 30 to 40 years ago to today, you’ll notice whole scenes and individual shots are much longer—even absurdly so, to our modern tastes—and it’s because the film industry in the 1960s assumed audiences needed upwards of 20 seconds to recognize and process an image. I don’t think I have to point out how differently we consume movies today, where seizure-inducing fly-by micro edits are the norm.

How does this affect learning, and how do eLearning strategies and techniques need to accommodate these cultural shifts? I’d like to offer some ideas about these questions, based on current experience and research.

Microlearning—defined as learning in short, digestible, bite-sized units—is next-gen training for a workforce ready to consume it the way it does everything else: fast, small, and “our way.” Easily accessible via devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and laptop computers in formats as varied as videos, blogs, games, quizzes, simulations, podcasts, or slideshows, microlearning solves for dwindling attention … Subscribe or log in to read the full article.
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Topics Covered

Design Strategies, Emerging Topics, Learning Media, Training Strategies

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