Forum Discussion
Short form content: what does it mean for us, and is anyone actually using Rise microlearning?
Been mulling this over for a while and wanted to see what others think.
Most people now consume information in short bursts. Shorts, Reels, TikTok. I don’t buy the idea that attention spans have collapsed, the same people happily sit through three hour podcasts and binge a whole Netflix series in a weekend. What’s collapsed is tolerance for padding. And our industry has churned out an awful lot of padded 40 minute modules with a locked Next button over the years, so maybe we’ve brought it on ourselves.
My hunch is that short form becomes the reinforcement and performance support layer. Sixty second how-tos at the point of need, spaced refreshers after the main course, that sort of thing. Deep skill building stays long form but has to justify every minute. The bit that gets squeezed is the generic middle, the 30 minute click-through that nobody remembers a week later.
There’s a catch though. Watching feels like learning but mostly isn’t. Short form is built for engagement, not retention, and without some sort of retrieval practice all you end up with is view counts. And some subjects just don’t work chopped into bits. I mostly develop safety and technical engineering training for heavy industry and you can’t build judgement about process safety from a stack of clips.
Which brings me to the tools. Rise has had microlearning as a course type for a good while now and I hardly ever see anyone using it. Genuine question, are you? My suspicion is the authoring isn’t the problem, it’s everything around it. SCORM and a traditional LMS are a clunky fit for a two minute piece of content. Nobody logs into an LMS for 90 seconds. Reach 360 goes some way towards this, but plenty of us are tied to a corporate LMS and that isn’t changing any time soon.
If Articulate are serious about this I think it’ll take more than a shorter course type. Content that can be scheduled and drip-fed out over days and weeks. Notifications that land somewhere people actually look, Teams, email, their phone. Analytics that measure something more useful than completion. Vertical, mobile first templates wouldn’t hurt either.
A few questions then. Are your stakeholders asking for shorter content yet, or is it still all full courses? Is anyone using Rise microlearning at any real scale, and if so how are you delivering it? And what would Articulate need to build for micro content to properly work in your setup?
Would be good to hear where others have got to with this.
2 Replies
Hey DShaw, you’re raising some interesting questions here.
Personally, I do think attention spans have become shorter. Yes, people still binge-watch Netflix and listen to hour-long podcasts, but how are they doing it? Often while multitasking: scrolling through their phones, doing household chores, or working on something else at the same time.
I’ve noticed this in myself as well. I may be consuming the content, but am I actually learning anything from that podcast? Am I really following the plot of the Netflix series I’m watching? Sometimes I’m not so sure.
Regarding my experience with Articulate’s Microlearning tool, we’ve used it a few times. It works well when you only have a few key points to communicate. For example, we currently use the microlearning format to provide short introductions to specific process management methods.
However, we’ve already run into some challenges. Tracking learner completion is not as reliable as it is in Rise. Occasionally, our LMS indicates that users have not completed a microlearning resource, even though they have. With a Rise course, it’s easy to direct learners to the progress bar and troubleshoot the issue, but that option doesn’t exist in Microlearning.
As for our stakeholders, they usually want to include as much content as possible. Learners, on the other hand, generally want to spend as little time as possible on training. Finding the right balance between those two perspectives is often the real challenge.
Thanks so much for your reply, you've raised some really good points. The one you raise about stakeholder requirements and what learners want resonates with me as it's what I regularly see with the majority of clients I work with. My fear is the first question a learner asks themselves when accessing a course is 'how long is this gonna take me' rather than 'what am I gonna learn from this session!'... As you say, that seems to be the challenge
