Keeping it simple is an adage we apply to so much in life but unfortunately not as frequently to our learning content. We’ve all been guilty of building learning which follows the given trend of the day; incorporating more video into a course because we think “youtube” has come into it’s own or adding many assessments because we’ve read a recent CLO magazine article on measuring performance/ KPIs. Our heart and goals are in the right place but these comprise the three additional observations we see to continuing a successful learning culture. This is part 2 of our original post, “4 steps to achieve a successful learning culture”.

1) Keep it simple!

We’ve implied this in so many of our posts, and after you’ve gained buy-in and seeing your managers and those in the field are creating content, now you can start really applying this idea. For onboarding team members for example, you may certainly want to create a long form “macro learning” course with all the trimmings; animations, videos and more to introduce them to key aspects of the company and make this a full blown 30 minute or longer course. But from that point on, why not test out smaller micro learning that is as simple as necessary to convey the idea? Image and text vs 5 minute video? One page job aid instead of micro learning?

2) Use less video.

This seems sacrilegious! Our clients tell us frequently how they like to employ their own uploaded videos or from Youtube or Vimeo into their micro learning and how we make it easy to do so. So why are we suggesting using less video and use other more static/ faster forms to convey an idea? Because reviewing content with text and images is frequently much faster for learners if that content can effectively convey the same ideas the first time learners view it. And when, not if they come back to review the content, if you’ve chosen video in your course your audience will be forced to scroll through it to find the segment they want to review.

3) Less assessments. In fact we should be discouraged about adding assessments at all for micro learning/ non-compliance learning.

It’s always in our quiver of learning tools and here at Feathercap we’re proud of how easy our assessments are to create and reuse. However…we are seeing so many clients starting to create much of their micro learning without them and have great success. Not only are the learning audiences appreciative of the fact they can save time by not having to complete an assessment or get marked in the course as “incomplete”, its clear to the authors by observing the time spent by the learning audience in viewing the content if they found it useful. For compliance or macro learning assessments are useful. But for more frequent and shorter micro learning we don’t see it as practical if our real goal is to optimize speed for our team to the right job behavior. This requires a combination of content, interactions with managers and supervisors to observe and see how progress unfolds. We will be seeing systems (including Feathercap) which will measure job behaviors through manager checklists, comparison of content viewed vs. success in their role compared to their peers. But again, the bottom line is your team will appreciate the fact you are showing clear intent of creating content for them rather then constantly and overtly trying to measure them. They may be more encouraged to take part in creating content as well.

See our AI and the Augmented Workforce primer on how a workforce and technology can effectively work on tasks together. 

A big driver for us at Feathercap is our search and workplace learning content curation solutions. Feel free to contact us for more.