Microlearning – A Successful Content Development Approach
I wanted to know of the most in-demand courses that eLearning can offer to students of today. Primarily so that I can ask my team to prepare courses in light of these subjects only. With all sorts of information out there on the internet, it’s highly likely that students know the basics of topics they are interested in. But if someone has to learn something in detail, possibly take certifications – eLearning courses or formal training is essential. There can be so many benefits of on-demand courses, we could use it for our website’s educational material, do content marketing and create off-the-shelf courses for the targeted audience. The goal entirely was to give access to deep-dive content and make it available for the learners.
The first thing I did was a need analysis. I did some research and went through some eLearning articles and found out the most common and popular topics. For example, social media marketing, financial markets, data science, how to plan projects, developing workplace soft skills, time management, big data, microlearning, machine learning and basic programming. These topics were cross-checked with at least ten different sources. I shared these topics with my stakeholders, and they picked three best topics of eLearning.
The next step was to involve the rest of my eLearning team and start building processes and strategies to rollout these courses. We were looking for a rapid development process so we can produce content faster. The best way I found was to create microlearning.
Microlearning is a bit size of a complete learning experience. The best way to develop Microlearning is to reduce the size of the content and pick what you think would help the learner to learn faster. Each microlearning must be solving a specific problem or providing specific knowledge.
We created storyboards of the whole curriculum for each topic and pass it on to our development team to make videos. After every video, we added at least one knowledge check.
Once we rolled out the videos, we estimated about a 20 per cent increase in our potential learners through our website. Our courses skyrocketed when one of the courses – the one about ’How to plan projects perfectly’ got a lot of views and clicks. There was a 60 per cent rise in our sign-ups. That prompted users to check out other courses as well which raised sign-ups for other courses offered as well. Our next order of business is figuring out what leads that one course to get so popular and hopefully implement those same features and idea into the rest of our courses going forward.