The problem with microlearning is that organizations often forget to design it with mobile users in mind. Here’s how Gomo customers help their workforces to learn wherever and whenever they want, thanks to eLearning that incorporates microlearning for mobile.
While there are lots of good reasons why microlearning has become a buzzword in the learning industry, its potential is wasted when it isn’t designed for mobile.
Many well-meaning courses make the crucial mistake of overlooking microlearning for mobile, designing courses only for desktop, despite all the evidence to support the popularity of mobile learning.
Employees expect microlearning for mobile
Making courses mobile-friendly as an afterthought inevitably leads to disengaged learners. Today’s employees are “untethered”, working from several locations and structuring their work in non-traditional ways to accommodate their lifestyles.
Research from Bersin by Deloitte shows that more than 80% of employees use a mobile device to learn, and seven out of ten do so with their own device.
At the same time, learners are distracted – often by work applications and collaboration tools – and tend to make a decision on whether they want to pursue a piece of learning within seconds of seeing a course.
They avoid videos that last longer than four minutes, and are infinitely more likely to engage with a five-minute module than an hour-long expanse of training material.
We’ve known about the benefits of bite-sized chunks of learning for a while now, but technology has only recently caught up with what microlearning really should be: quick, concise and on-demand. Microlearning is deliberately short and sweet, which means training is super-focused, highly memorable and usually tailored to one product or feature.
This makes it ideal for use as a quick refresher to help learners find exactly what they need, rather than having to drill down into a long course.
Microlearning: a matter of convenience
In many cases, learners want to accumulate knowledge in an occasional burst here and there.
If they are sitting in a car before an important sales meeting, their ability to instantly access a reminder of the key knowledge points they need to know for their sales pitch can make a big difference. The boost it gives to their confidence and communication could give them the competitive edge to seal the deal.
Microlearning for mobile courses should be:
- Fast to load and easy to navigate
- Available on-demand for learners who want to build their knowledge at any time
- Just in time, when users need to access specific information immediately
- Smartphone-friendly, filling the screen on any device and supporting swipe gestures
One instance when people are likely to find time for a quick, short burst of learning is when they are out of range and lacking an Internet connection, such as during a flight or on a construction site.
In this kind of setting, a mobile-friendly app comes into its own. Learners can download courses straight onto their device for full offline accessibility, with all of their progress communicated back to you back to you through the app once they are back online.
How can you take full advantage of mobile design?
Creating content that is fast, easy to access and available on-demand means making everything mobile-friendly. Gomo is ideal for designing courses in a microlearning format, letting your learners swipe and tap rather than click around lots of screens.
All of our courses are created in HTML5. This ensures that content is adaptive and responsive, so you can create beautiful microlearning for mobile devices. This content plays on any kind of device without having to compromise quality or create different versions of the same course for several device types and screen sizes.
Need an example? See it in action:
Sample Gomo courseEngaging, impactful and up-to-date courses
With mobile-friendly microlearning, everything is available in the palm of your learners’ hands. You can produce engaging videos and stories for social media sharing, games and scenarios that incentivize your users to return to courses, and incorporate augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) to really bring your learning to life.
You’ll notice increased retention from your learners, because learning about one part of their job in a short chunk of learning is so much easier than trying to remember lots of different points.
A complete solution to make microlearning for mobile memorable
Gomo leads the market at the intersection of microlearning and mobile learning. We love helping a wide range of companies to create innovative, world-class microlearning for mobile devices.
Whether learners are using a laptop, desktop, tablet or smartphone, the text and other assets (like images and video) always looks the right size and interact smoothly. This gives people a great learning experience without any of the problems associated with courses that are not designed for mobile devices. That’s why Gomo-designed courses achieve a perfect score in Google’s mobile-friendliness test.