At Skilljar, one of the most common challenges we hear from our customers is determining what content to create, and in what format. Whether or not you have an existing archive of content that can be repurposed, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the variety of lesson formats available – from live and recorded webinars, to worksheets, slide presentations, PDF infographics, quizzes, and more. To pare things down, one channel I regularly recommend customers take advantage of are what we call microlearning lessons.
What are Microlearning Lessons?
Microlearning lessons are brief videos, usually two-to-six minutes in length, that are designed to address a specific topic or question. They are designed to be useful both as standalone resources, as well as components of larger course series or offerings. The best (and easiest) way to ensure microlearning lessons are relevant is to source the topics and/or questions from common support tickets and frequently requested information (your Customer Success and Support Teams are great resources to help uncover these FAQs). While the value of such microlearning videos might be clear, you may be wondering why I specifically recommend this format? Read on for further detail and for examples of microlearning courses.
The Value of Brevity
As we’ve seen firsthand with our own customers, courses that have a video element had a 15 percent higher completion rate than those without. And with ever-shrinking attention spans, many learners (especially voluntary ones), find videos more engaging than text-based resources. Additionally, video microlearning lessons help bridge the gap between your other support systems, enabling learners to self-serve and self-solve with context, especially if a Support Specialist is not available. Microlearning lessons with video offer your customers brief, searchable, engaging resources that can also include examples or sample processes for deeper learning.
Maintaining Relevance
Microlearning lessons are intended to be quick references for your end-users’ most common challenges and questions, but how do you ensure that the topics you select will resonate? As I noted above, your Customer Success and Support Teams are great resources for helping you uncover trending topics among support tickets.
At Skilljar, when we receive support tickets asking questions about how a feature works or what happens when a user selects a certain item, we categorize them as Customer Education-related. We regularly analyze these support tickets to understand how frequently users are encountering various challenges. These types of questions are particularly well-suited for microlearning lesson topics because the solutions are often easily achieved with brief demonstrations.
Our QuickTips library serves as the main repository for microlearning video lessons. New students or curious customers can browse the library for videos that are interesting to them and their unique projects or skill sets. But the usefulness of our microlearning lessons doesn’t end there.
While the QuickTips library acts as a host for all our of microlearning lessons, the lessons themselves are also embedded into relevant courses and support materials. In some cases, video lessons will be used in multiple courses or resources to extend their value to the widest audience. For example, our onboarding courses are augmented with QuickTips videos to reinforce key learnings. Some of these same videos appear in support ticket responses or articles to ensure users understand the solution.
As evidenced by the variety of ways we use video ourselves, microlearning lessons are both an effective and efficient investment. In some cases, your videos may be relevant in multiple resources or across several courses. Ultimately, microlearning lessons enable you to do more with less. You can address multiple learning needs with the same piece of collateral and can update that single piece as functionality changes. As you develop your customer education program, consider using microlearning lessons to augment your onboarding process, integrate them into your certification program, add them to your support articles, and more.
In my next post, I will discuss the crawl, walk, run methodology for leveraging microlearning lessons and courses.
