MICRO-LEARNING: ESSENTIAL CONTENT TO IMPROVE LEARNING

The digital world and its continuous rapid evolution has changed the behavior of all people, facilitating many aspects of everyday life. All this gave birth new forms of learning, communication and information. The world around is no longer the same as before and we are not the same as before. New trends and tendencies are continually affirming itself in our continuous interaction with other human beings and with the world that hosts us, sometimes generating unease and concern, when instead what is new is often a positive evolution of our actions and a facilitation in the results we intend to achieve.

 

Within this process of continuous and fast evolution the Micro-learning which finds its place in the field of training and learning with great success today. In essence, micro-learning is about distillation targeted and shrewd of key information and knowledge in blocks of limited dimensions that are easy to understand and remember. The teaching blocks contain small learning fragments, no longer than about 3 or 5 minutes, focused on essential teaching points and on important learning moments, both for the company and for those who work there. The contents disclosed in micro-learning can be of the most diverse types, images, spoken language, video, text, and the tools of use are the same tools of our daily life as well as of work, from the PC, to the tablet or to our smartphone .

These same tools have become essential for everyone, at work and in daily life.

If the hand was once, for Kant, the external brain for man and the primary source of our relations with the external world, unlike other living beings who essentially use their gold-pharyngeal apparatus as an essential tool to know substantially a world made of smells and flavors, the hand we need today is one digital hand, equipped with tools, whatever they are, that allow us to know, work, communicate.

It may be that the purists of classical learning turn up their noses in the face of the radical changes of this moment, which require a revolution of methodologies and training techniques creating new and effective ones, but the success of new methodologies must be carefully looked at to understand the positive aspects of which they are bearers.

In a 2017 research the Association for Talent Development he argues that 92% of the companies that have tested micro-learning believe to develop it further, and 67% of the companies that have not yet used it, plan to introduce it among their training tools in a short time.

It should not be overlooked that the satisfaction of the new training method is not detected much and only in the companies that use it, when also in end users who use them daily through the devices they prefer, in the individual times considered best, and with personalized repetition according to individual needs.

This suggests the direction of the process.

In 1953 Ray Bradbury gave us in his novel 451 Fahrenheit a gloomy vision of the future in which the books, bearers of social concerns, were systematically burned. 451 fahrenheit is the minimum self-ignition temperature of the paper. Today it happens that, if we want, by clicking on our mobile phone, we can learn in a few seconds that 451 fahrenheit correspond, by conversion, to 233 degrees Celsius. This very simple operation, after all, is nothing more than a situation of Micro-learning, for its essentiality and its speed. We should not believe, according to the mood expressed with concern by the author, that we are witnessing a progressive elimination of books from our educational systems, but rather the fact that alongside the traditional educational and training methodologies, other, faster methodologies are successfully accompanied and targeted, and the two forms of knowledge are not excluded not at all.

Instant Gratification Era

The epoch we are living in, lively and turbulent, has been called by sociologists the 'Instant Gratification Era'. Until a few years ago, this era of immediate gratification only concerned the very young, but now it increasingly affects other sections of the population as well.

The era of instant gratification is characterized by the enormous quantity and speed of information which is transmitted to us every day by an increasing number of tools at our disposal. In such an intense and fast relationship process, even our ability to keep our attention to events has substantially changed in terms of time and duration, to the point that, if we are to believe recent Microsoft studies, our systematic attention span does not exceed the 8 seconds.

If this is plausible, we must believe that extremely targeted and rapid small information is much easier to remember and use by providing the learner with the information he needs in daily work at any time and quickly. This does not exclude, for those who feel the need, to deepen how and when they want the same information, with the same tools as always, in the infinite information distribution available on the web. All this by choosing the moments deemed appropriate and with the possibility of a decidedly individualized training.

The Microlearning approach is already widely diversified in itself, exploiting various types of engaging media such as video, audio, presentations or games to better keep the interest of the user always active.

The advantages of micro-learning

Where the world becomes rapid, one should not be surprised if information, communication and learning also become rapid, and this is being achieved with smart, effective methodologies that create user satisfaction, allow for extensive customization of the training course and content, actively involve the recipients, and quickly satisfy their needs.

The training made available is very specific, relevant to the needs of the user's work. Every single content is strictly focused on a specific topic or specific skill.

Micro-learning has shown to have great training effectiveness. The communication method that he uses engages memory for a limited time and offers people the opportunity to reflect and connect the content to what they already know in a simple and quick way.

The treated contents are deliberately short and you can enjoy them in the desired time spaces, during a coffee break or on a trip on the subway and review them at any time if you feel the need.

Finally, if that were not enough, this form of communication and learning is perceived as a playful event, because content is often produced as fun, non-demanding and engaging information, effectively responding to the purposes for which it is built.