This month’s TOPkit Digest is brought to you by Breana Davey, student of Instructional Design & Technology, M.A., University of Central Florida. Breana was guided by internship mentors Baiyun Chen (Baiyun.Chen@ucf.edu), Ph.D., Senior Instructional Designer, Program Director, Personalized Adaptive Learning (PAL) and Roslyn Miller (Roslyn.Miller@ucf.edu), Ph.D. Associate Instructional Designer. Both mentors are instructional designers at the Center for Distributed Learning, University of Central Florida. She discusses Microlearning.

Microlearning, formerly recognized as Incremental Learning, represents a popular pedagogical approach among instructional designers, particularly in the contemporary digital learning landscape. This method encourages the creation of concise, easily digestible lessons, emphasizing the delivery of targeted and focused content in training and academia.

As a designer using the microlearning approach, the primary goal is to deliver concise, targeted lessons that not only help learners retain information but also actively engage them through personalized and interactive elements. This approach emphasizes straightforward and captivating design to keep learners focused and ensures accessibility for all. Designers should also strive to provide short, engaging instruction that learners can access anytime, anywhere, on any device, offering the flexibility to learn at their own convenience.

#1: Focus on a singular learning objective. The objective of each microlearning module is to deliver instruction within a concise limit of under 10 minutes, ensuring effective comprehension by the learner(s). A designer or developer is tasked with judiciously utilizing this time to concentrate on a singular objective or topic creating content that is both focused and engaging.

Read: Microlearning: Why It Works and How You Can Use It

Watch: Intentional Microlearning: How to Identify Learning Objectives for Effective Elearning

#2: Interactivity is Key. An effective strategy to engage learners involves incorporating them directly into the lesson. Personalization and interactivity elevate a microlearning session from a simple informational video to an engaging interactive experience, allowing learners to actively participate in the class. The integration of interactivity can manifest through various means such as quizzes, discussion boards, interactive animations, games, and other engaging elements.

Read: 8 Ways to Build Interactive Microlearning Courses

#3: Be creative and intentional with your design. As microlearning aims to deliver essential information within shorter lesson formats, a successful mini lesson must effectively capture and retain learners' attention with appealing design elements while delivering specific targeted instruction.

Watch: 5 Best Practices to Create Amazing Microlearning Videos

#4: Accessibility. Accessibility. Accessibility. In addition to its efficiency, microlearning must be accessible to learners at their convenience and through various means. This includes providing captions for videos, a text equivalent for images, and properly formatted text that can be read by assistive technologies, such as a screen reader to ensure the lesson is user-friendly for all individuals. Furthermore, creating microlearning content compatible with multiple devices and ensuring its availability at all times is essential. This approach allows learners to access the material at their convenience rather than restricting them to a predetermined schedule.

Read: 7 Tips for Designing Accessible Elearning

In the design of microlearning instruction, the critical focus lies in delivering targeted, bite-sized lessons to optimize learner comprehension. Actively involving learners within the lesson through personalized and interactive elements elevates a simple content chunk into an immersive learning experience. Successful microlearning integrates interactivity and personalization and emphasizes the importance of captivating design to capture attention while effectively delivering specific instructions. Equally crucial is ensuring accessibility by incorporating features like captions and screen readers, emphasizing user-friendliness for a diverse audience. Furthermore, compatibility across devices and unrestricted access empower learners to engage with content at their convenience, underscoring the flexibility offered by this approach over rigid schedules.

TOPkit contributor, Nancy Swenson, explains how Universal Design for Learning (UDL) directs curriculum developers in meeting the unique needs of each learner. It acts as a manual for developing inclusive teaching objectives, strategies, resources, and evaluations that prioritize adaptability over a strict, one-size-fits-all methodology.

Microlearning activities can be developed using Universal Design for Learning (UDL) concepts to cater to the diverse needs of learners. By integrating UDL principles into the design of microlearning, content producers can offer a spectrum of formats, interaction options, and assessments, tailored to accommodate a variety of learning styles and capacities.

For example, microlearning modules adhering to UDL criteria may incorporate multimedia components, diverse representations of content, and choices for various styles of delivery. In essence, while microlearning addresses the structural aspects of content distribution, UDL focuses on establishing inclusive learning environments.

The integration of UDL principles into microlearning design not only enhances accessibility but also produces efficacy for a broader spectrum of learners.

Bren Bedford, MNM, SFC®, Web Project Analyst II, Center for Distributed Learning, University of Central Florida

Florence Williams, Ph.D., Associate Instructional Designer, Center for Distributed Learning, University of Central Florida