Making Micro Course Content

By: Justin Ferriman • February 2, 2016
Filed Under:

Editing-ElearningIf you have created an online course you know that it doesn’t take long before the course can become quite large consisting of many lessons and sub-topics.

While some courses simply require this much content, it isn’t always ideal from a learner perspective.

We live in a world of short attention spans.

What’s more, when the course is take from a computer there is a world of distraction literally available at the learner’s fingertips.

If your course has lesson after lesson after lesson, expect learners to wander to their email or favorite websites.

Use Micro Learning

To help prevent this from happening it’s a good idea to use micro learning where possible.

First, micro learning is often preferred by learners as it doesn’t take long to consume the content.

It has been suggested that breaking up content into small “chunks” is going to make the transfer of learning more efficient.

This could be for a variety of reasons, but one possibility is that learning in stretches of 3-7 minutes matches our working memory capacity.

From an organizational perspective micro learning generally costs less to create than traditional courses since less designing is needed to make the content of all the lessons flow together.

If you already have a large course then you can consider breaking it down into smaller mini-courses.

If you can’t do it to the entire course, then one option is to break out some of the content and make those mini-courses the pre-requisites to the larger, more detailed course.

This has the benefit of providing micro learning opportunities and also making the longer course a little more concise.

One last thing: micro learning isn’t the “be all end all”.

Sometimes an online course cannot be split up, nor should it.

Use your best judgement if micro learning is conducive to the course content.

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter