Microlearning vs Traditional Learning
Published
July 12, 2019
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We’ve all experienced it… sitting down to listen to a manager drone on to teach you about the latest product release. You may be engaged for five minutes but suddenly the beeping of emails takes priority. Microlearning is on the rise as a cure to the pitfalls of traditional learning. Here are four reasons why microlearning is winning in the battle of microlearning vs traditional learning.
Traditional Learning
Traditional learning may refer to learning that occurs in a classroom setting with one ‘teacher’. The ‘teacher’ regulates the flow of discussion and dissemination of information. Traditional learning also usually includes the expectation of learners to consolidate their knowledge on their own at home, known as homework.
1. Microlearning makes updating course material easy
Traditional learning tends to rely on large lesson plans, whether it’s an hour course, a day long workshop or a twenty-page PDF. One of the core issues with large amounts of content is that when something changes it’s difficult to update all the necessary course material and organize the redistribution of it. With microlearning comes easy to use online authoring tools where updating content is as easy as copy and paste and redistribution is at the click of a button.
2. Microlearning helps to focus learning
Traditional learning often requires you to deliver a lesson plan that bundles together a lot of information, some of which is relevant to some groups, some of which is relevant to others. The end result being that the lesson content is not targeted and the message is lost in a sea of information. The solution provided by microlearning is to provide extremely targeted lessons with specific outcomes for different user groups.
3. Microlearning is driven by analytics
We’ve all heard the adage that knowledge is power. How about seeing a breakdown of how your staff have engaged with learning material and being able to track their completion so you can improve this?
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This is what microlearning tools like SC Training (formerly EdApp) allow you to do. A frequent issue faced internally by companies is that staff education is a ‘nice to have’ and it’s often hard to justify investment as the added value is often not quantifiable. Microlearning, unlike traditional learning, gives you quick, real-time information on how lessons that you’ve delivered are up-skilling your staff.
4. Microlearning vs Traditional Learning is more cost effective
One of the biggest advantages of microlearning is the ability to deliver learning at a very low cost across large numbers of employees. Delivering lessons via mobile learning allows for reduced material costs, costs for onsite instructors and significantly reduces the cost of lost productivity by anyone attending. Why have a thousand staff take an hour to attend a workshop when they can have focused course content delivered that can be done in five minutes of downtime.
If you’d like to learn more about SC Training (formerly EdApp) microlearning, get in touch at enquiries@edapp.com. You can also try SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s Mobile LMS for free by signing up here.
Related: Why microlearning works
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Author
Guest Author Daniel Brown
Daniel Brown is a senior technical editor and writer that has worked in the education and technology sectors for two decades. Their background experience includes curriculum development and course book creation.