How Microlearning is Revolutionizing the L&D Space with Ali Siddiqui

Luis Malbas  
Here's what I got. All right, let's see. Yep, it looks like we're live. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the training, learning and development community. Thanks for joining us today. Let's see, ah, we've got a nice group of audience members in the chat. Martin started it out five hours ago. And Mercedes is here, Rick hammer. Some are from Lebanon. Wow. And Dion from Vienna, Austria. And many, many more, it looks like so great. I saw it looks like that folks are actually really interested in micro learning. So before I get started, one thing I want to mention is next week, we have one of T LDCs. bigger events. It's called ideal 22, which is the inclusion diversity, equity and accessibility for learning event. If you go to ide a for learning idea, fo r learning.com. You can register for that free event. We're going to be talking all about inclusion, diversity, equity accessibility. I've got like I think nine speakers right now and happens all week. It's free. There'll be in the air meet platform, it'd be great way to start out that holiday season. And the speaker lineup is absolutely fantastic. So if you're at all interested in that, please join us just registered idea for learning.com. And so today, we have Ali Siddiqui. Did I say that right? That's right. Yeah. Excellent, um, and Ali to reach out to me about doing a broadcast to talk about micro learning. And I thought it was really interesting. When you had sent me the message and you had said, and I posted sort of this title for it how micro learning is revolutionising revolutionising the l&d space? But then you would also what were some of the titles you had to have him over here, what we're getting wrong about micro learning was another one that you thought might be appropriate for this conversation. And then can micro learning ref revolutionize Workplace Learning question mark? And then how can we design micro learning experiences that drive workplace learning? I thought it was intriguing that you had given me that, you know, that set of of titles potentially, for this conversation? And and also, you're a former teacher and instructional designer, now work with Coursera as a senior products product consultant in the r&d space. And yes, indeed, I have purchased a few Coursera products in my life. And I think they were good, I can't buy. I know I bought them. But sometimes I buy courses sort of like the way I buy books. But but fantastic. And it's a learning platform that I'm associated that I know about, also, because I work for O'Reilly Media, which is also a learning platform that that sells courses. And so it was it's great to have you here, and especially someone from Coursera to talk about this topic. And so what I'm not quite sure, do you want me to sort of stay in chat or on screen? Or do you have like slides or anything? Or we're just going to have a conversation about micro learning?

Ali Siddiqui  
Um, well, we'll have a conversation aren't slides, but we'll touch on some some key points and things like that.

Luis Malbas  
Okay. All right. Let me go ahead. I'm going to just hide myself and kind of let you take it away. And I'll jump on whenever I have anything that that that I want to bring up and I'll be watching chat. Okay.

Ali Siddiqui  
Yeah. Yeah, we'll keep it really conversational. With everyone in the chat as well. I mean, you know, we don't want it to be too much like a TED Talk and more like, a conversation between everyone. So

Luis Malbas  
sounds good. Yeah. Okay, go.

Ali Siddiqui  
Perfect. Um, well, I think the, you know, like Alex was saying, one of the main reasons why, you know, micro learning has really surfaced and come up to be such a hot topic right now is because, you know, at the end of the day, I think one of the things that a lot of instructors and teachers are noticing is that, you know, student attention spans, you know, it's just like a anecdotal sort of thing where everyone's like, you know, they're not paying attention as much. And they're, you know, they're, you know, kind of distracted. And, you know, it's not just students really even in the workplace. I was reading an article recently, where people are saying that people get interrupted every 11 minutes in, in the workplace, you know, moving from one task to another. And so there's this idea that if we construct and continue to construct learning experiences that are very long, we may lose a lot of people and that's, that's a very big deal because, you know, one of the things I was reading recently is one of the primary driving factors why people leave their jobs is because they don't feel like they're upskilling. They don't feel like they're getting better at their jobs. And in the l&d space, you know, it's very important to kind of, you know, upskill people. And the reason why when you dig into it, the reason why a lot of people are not upskilling in the work or not taking additional training and things like that, it's because, you know, the primary factor, you can kind of think about it in your own life, is that there's not enough time. So people don't have enough time to kind of, you know, consume those extra trainings and things like that. So I think there's a survey by the, you know, this team of like learning and development professionals, where they're saying, like, there's about a whopping 94% of people said that they would prefer micro learning experiences to traditional time consuming elearning courses. You know, and that's a staggering number. There's also, you know, an industry view report that said, they surveyed about 385 employees. And 50% of those employees said that they would use the company's learning tools more, if the courses were shorter. So all this to say, is micro learning. I mean, the reason why we're talking about it is because it's having some really real business implications for a lot of companies. So because traditional courses are just taking way too long, people aren't engaging in them, people aren't engaging, they don't feel like they're learning in their jobs. And that's leading to a lot of turnover, a lot people leaving their jobs. So, in a way, micro learning is now being positioned as the thing that can help curb this turnover, it can help upskill people while they are kind of working. So that said, I think, you know, what I'll do is, you know, I want to spend a good amount of time, you know, answering questions and things. But I think, you know, just a little bit about, you know why I'm speaking about this right, now, it might be helpful to get some context. So in the past, just recently, actually wrapped up two kind of big projects on micro learning in developing micro learning experiences. So one, which has recently been publicized by Coursera. It's called Coursera clips. So Coursera launched 200,000, short video learning experiences on their platform. And, you know, although it's only available to a certain segment of users, the whole idea behind that is, how can we get people to start actually using and learning, you know, the skills that they need to on the job, how to make it as easy as possible. So that's something that I did recently. And then in the past, I've worked with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create online Science Education courseware. And, you know, that course where we designed it, some aspects of it to be micro learning based, where you're learning something like, you know, the effects of microgravity on the human body, but you're learning it in small miniature, micro learning experiences. So, over the course of these two projects, and probably half a dozen other micro learning experiences that I helped create, for other organizations, there are some key things that I've learned that are I feel are key, and a lot of things that people feel like people are kind of missing out on. So I'll go through them briefly. And then we'll kind of open it up for some questions. And as I go through them, I think one of the things that I'll emphasize is what's kind of the the learning science behind it and kind of what what is the research kind of say about that? So, first and foremost, micro learning experiences. I mean, at the end of the day, what are they? I think, at the core, and since you know, so many people tuning in are, you know, have like a teaching and learning sort of background. Again, the day it really comes down to choosing a crystal clear learning objective for the topic. So what that means is not only do you have to choose a learning objective, that is the right scope for a micro learning experience. So if we're talking about an experience, that's five minutes to 10 minutes, you probably aren't going to have a learning objective that is learn Python, you know what I'm saying? Like it needs to be the right size. So what specifically are you doing or what specifically can you accomplish in five minutes? That's key. I think the one of the biggest things that people are misunderstanding about micro learning is that they think that you can take a really large sort of topic and as long as you just cut down each unit just cut it down into like five minute pieces arbitrarily Is that you'll, you'll have like micro learning. So the key thing here is micro learning is not just about being short, it's not just having like a five minute video, it's about designing something to fit within that small timeframe. So you want to choose a learning objective that can be taught in that specific timeframe. So that's, that's really important. A lot of times in my experience, and you know, according to a lot of others that have worked in this micro learning space. One thing that really sticks out is choosing a topic is very important. So typically, people will choose items that are applied to things that you can apply, usually less theoretical things, things that, you know, sometimes are best reinforced through repetition. Sometimes people use it for foreign language, a really common example is Duolingo. It's an app that maybe many of you have heard of, but, you know, it really kind of teaches a really small chunk in there, like five minutes or so micro learning experience. So that's the first kind of piece. So the first piece that we're learning about micro learning experiences is that you have to choose an objective, that's the right scope. And you have to, it's preferred to choose something that learners can apply. So when you think about your learning objectives, think about action verbs where people are applying something is typically the way to go less on the side of, you know, focusing on theory of something. The second piece about micro learning, aside from the objectives is this big piece about time, time, time, time, like what is the ideal time for a micro learning experience, there's so much research out there about the ideal time being six minutes, I think there's even an article published about like the myth of six minute attention span that learners have. But I'll, I'll kind of mention two things. So, you know, according to the learner research that I've conducted in the past, and according to some, you know, research articles, and, you know, even talking to some other folks that work for lnd, at big tech companies, I'll say, you know, the ideal times to keep things less than 10 minutes. There is a study by the rapid learning institute that said that 94% of their learners prefer modules that are less than 10 minutes in duration. And I know that even at Coursera itself. Coursera recently published a report called the drivers of quality report, and they always opt to keep their video lectures in their courses and things under 10 minutes. And then they say that that boosts learner satisfaction by 16%. So,

you know, there are some points over here, we're seeing less than 10 minutes come up a number of times. But I spoke to one of my colleagues just last week, great Stover, she's a manager of instructional designers. And her team is responsible for creating all sorts of micro learning experiences to upskill the workforce that they deal with, and she would say, to design content no longer than four minutes. And, you know, according to her shoot, we were talking, you know, really, she was saying it's all about reducing the cognitive load and keeping things as concise as possible and hammering into key takeaways. So, you know, I think even learning people like, say, learning and stretches of three to seven minutes matches the human working, you know, working memory capacity. So, I think that's an important piece to keep in mind, especially because lack of time, according to like Forbes, you know, there's an article where lack of times is like the biggest barrier to workplace development. So you Yeah, so I think that's, that's something really important to keep in mind. Keep it less than 10 minutes. So so far, we've talked about choosing the right objective, keeping things less than 10 minutes. And then I guess the question arises, like what do you do in those 10 minutes? And sometimes, you know, it is true that micro learning could just be one infographic, it could just be like one video. However, in practice Do you want to make that five minute to 10 minute sort of experience as engaging as possible? So what you know, one of the things that you can consider is to try to instead of providing like walls of text to kind of vary things up. So include visuals include a little bit of audio, a little bit of video, if possible, and yeah, wherever possible infographics, visuals over text, but just be really strategic about shifting things up and not just hitting people with one kind of mode. Throughout the entire experience. You know, one thing that we can kind of learn from, like in terms of, you know, UX design, there's a principle like Miller's law. And it says, like, the average human brain can only hold seven plus or minus two pieces of information at a given time. So you know, the amount of information, you know, that you kind of can hold to actually work into your long term memory is limited, you know, and UX designers use this to kind of limit how much they show on a web page, for example, is something that instructional designers can use as well. You don't want to overload your screens, or overload kind of whatever you're showing learners. You know, when you're designing this micro learning experience, a really good example over here is Google primer, it's an app, I would recommend everyone, you know, to kind of check it out, if you're thinking about how do I create, like great micro learning experiences. What it is, is, it's an app that kind of teaches about marketing and Google ads and things. But they're really strategic about how much text they show you on any one screen at a time, I think there's no more than two sentences per screen. And then talking to my colleague earlier, they have this principle of whenever they do micro learning experiences, learners should never have to scroll on their phone, it should be no more than five sentences per screen. So really, yeah, I think the link is out in the chat. But I really encourage everyone to kind of check that out. But, you know, you want to even like, you know, if you are trying to apply this to, maybe you're not doing online education, maybe doing in person education. So one of the key things to keep in mind there is if you're kind of delivering a training, to kind of every three to seven minutes, shifted up maybe at a breakout room or, you know, kind of switch the modality. Remember, keep the learning bits bite size. And that's so that. So that's kind of what we've talked about. So far. So objective, keeping that in mind, keeping things less than 10 minutes, and then keeping content bite sized, so not overloading learner within those 10 minutes. And that's pretty much you know, at the essence, what micro learning experiences should kind of be like, I think the last piece is how do you kind of close out a micro learning experience. So there's two key things here. Number one is summarizing the learning. So at the end of the micro learning experience, no matter what your learning objective is, at the end, you always want to have a summary of what are the key takeaways, and all the micro learning experiences that I've worked on and have seen, this is like a constant. And I think it's partly based off of the UX principle of like, you know, the serial position effect. So the human brain tends to remember things at the very beginning of an experience, and the very end of something as well. And so that, you know, having the key takeaways at the end of the learning experience, it pulls on what's called like the recency effect, people remember kind of thing that they see last. So you really want to make sure that you're adding those key takeaways at the end, really closing that learning loop really nicely. So that's how you should end a micro learning experience. And if you want to take it one step further, I would say, add in a little assessment, I'm not talking something really extreme, like, you know, 20 question quiz, you know, it's short answers, and all that doesn't have to be that much. But one thing to get learners to kind of apply what they just learned. And, you know, learner research that we've conducted in the past, we found that, you know, for learners in specific domains, that's it, that makes a big difference. They want to actually apply it when they learn something, those that are working on topics that, you know, are maybe soft skills, like feedback or leadership, things like that. I think an important thing to keep in mind is at the end of your micro learning experience, if you're trying to get learners to action, something, to do something or to change their behavior. An important thing to keep in mind is maybe at the end of that learning experience. You want to give them something to do? Right? You want to, it could be a small sort of action. But you want to kind of close what's called this intention action gap. So people are maybe they learned about feedback. Oh my gosh, there's so many great things about feedback. I can't wait to be giving feedback. But then at the end of the micro learning experience, there's nothing, right? If instead, you kind of added at the end of the micro learning experience, hey, why don't you you know, provide a small piece of feedback to, you know, a co worker, it could be positive feedback or something like that. It then kind of closes this intention action gap, because you're giving people a prompt to do the behavior. And so there's also, you know, there's just idea. So when we talk about l&d The lnd space, a lot of times, we'll talk about a Kirkpatrick model, and how we can actually get people to go from learning to actually applying to lead into business results. And one of one of the models that kind of underlies How do you get people to actually take action after learning something is the Fogg behavioral model? You know, you know, definitely something to look into. But the summary of that model is that in order for someone to actually change their behavior or do something, which oftentimes we want to happen in the l&d space, we want people to change their behavior, they need to have the ability to do it, which is what the micro learning experience should give them, they should have the motivation to do it, something that they should get from the experience as well. But then they need a prompt to do the behavior. And so we want to provide that at the end of our experiences as well. So a great way to do this is to add a prompt, but people also have people do a reflection question at the end, how can I incorporate this, I've also seen that as well. So that's pretty much it. Um, you know, all in all, what we've talked about with Mac learning students is really nailing down that objective nailing down, you know, a time, which is less than 10 minutes, keeping things bite sized, and varying things. And then when you end your experience, summarize kind of what you've done. And what you've learned the key takeaways, and then, you know, get learners to apply what they are learning. And that could be through an assessment. And it could be through an action that we want them to kind of take. But that's, in essence, what I have seen in my time working on like learning experiences. And you know, like I said, there are some really great examples out there that I'd encourage everyone to check out. If you aren't already hooked and addicted to Duolingo as a language learning tool, check that out. And Google primer, I think, is a great example as well. Yeah.

Luis Malbas  
No, that's great. That primer is something that I definitely want to play with. Let me make sure my audio is on. Yeah, it looks like it's all good. I want to call out let's see Mercedes had posted in chat. Mercedes said it sounds like building the case for micro learning experiences based on an l&d strategy that values the learner or human experience. And moving beyond compliance. In some cases, this is where I imagined some would need to focus before investing in building the experiences. That's a great comment, Mercedes. And I do sort of want to come back around Ali and ask you about some examples of good micro learning objectives. Like what, like, if you're creating an objective, how do you know it would be appropriate for micro learning? Like, you know, say you have some subject matter that you're wanting to build a course around? How do you ensure that micro low learning that the objective is the correct one for micro learning?

Ali Siddiqui  
Yeah, I think a good framework for this is to think about, you know, go back to Bloom's taxonomy. And it also, you know, with Bloom's Taxonomy, you got those lower tiers where you're having people comprehend, define, comprehend and up to apply. And then you have those higher tiers evaluation, creation and synthesis. So if your micro learning experience is assuming that learners are new to a particular topic, you'll want to choose learning objectives that are kind of more aligned with the lower three. And there is something to be said about, you know, building, you know, a chain of micro learning experiences that can go up Bloom's Taxonomy, but as if you're just starting out, and you're assuming your learners don't have a strong background or previous experience, I would say, you know, going with those action verbs that kind of limit you to the bottom three of Bloom's Taxonomy are a pretty good way to start.

Luis Malbas  
Okay, great. No. And so your background teacher, Instructional Designer, right, you've done both? How about your sort of your evolution? Into? Or how did you learn to like, what what happened? Like, what? How are you all of a sudden? In the situation where you had to create micro learning experiences? And how did? How were you able to develop this stuff? And how did you learn it? And, and just that entire process?

Ali Siddiqui  
Yeah, um, I think that that's a good question. When so I remember when I was teaching, you know, high school minimum, maybe over 10 years ago, high school chemistry and physics on the Southside of Chicago, you know, the teaching blocks that I had were an hour and a half long. So you had a group of 30 students, you had them for an hour and a half. And, you know, really, very early on, in my experience, I learned, yeah, this is definitely not going to work like you cannot, for children, you cannot just give a straight like lecture for longer than, you know, 10 minutes, tops. So, kind of trial by fire was was the way that that had started. You know, by the time I finished though, one of the things that I really learned is like, how do you ship things up, like switch things up in a very consistent sort of way, throughout the entire class period? So, you know, really, the, the origins of that is, I mean, did it end up turning out to feel like a variety show where something is changing, like, every 15 minutes, I mean, something like that. But um, you know, that's kind of where I started, when it came to. But then when I transitioned into instructional design, that same sort of principle, you know, persisted of learners attention span, learners commitment to continue and persist in the learning experience. I mean, we know that MOOCs were kind of heralded as like the savior of like online education, we solved it. But the completion rate for a typical MOOC is what like 5% 7%, something extremely low. So, again, we found that we had that same issue. How do we kind of keep learners attention and engagement throughout our process? And so one of the things that, you know, we constructed early on is these micro learning experiences, and to kind of combat that to kind of keep people hooked, engaged, and get them kind of a feeling like, Hey, we're getting somewhere we're accomplishing something. And that's a really powerful feeling. And I think that's, that's been a really powerful driver. And I think one of the ways to develop the skill of creating great micro learning experiences is I've been lucky enough to work with a lot of UX designers. And I think there's a lot to be said about the UX of designing in education. You know, a lot of what makes something really successful and not, you know, and one of things that some of the things that I talked about, they really pull on some of these principles that are using UX design as well. You know, Miller's law comes up a lot, you know, the recency effect, and things like that.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, it feels like we don't, you know, I know when to LDC, I had a UX playlist a couple years ago, where I kind of just had a small mini event where we talked about user experience for the whole event, but it feels like there's really a need there to bring more UX into the the daily sort of active working lives of all l&d professionals. Very interesting. So this whole question about tick tock and you know, just social media in general moving you know, you've got what Instagram reels YouTube shorts, you've got all this stuff going on? Has that evolved the way that micro learning is built or consumed or anything like that? Have you noticed? Since you've been working building micro learning courses, it changing to sort of I don't know to meet the the trends or stuff in popular media?

Ali Siddiqui  
Yeah, this is interesting. It's like the maybe like a chicken egg situation is like, is the popular media kind of adjusting based on how we are we adjusting because this hub, you know, popular media is now packaging content? You know, I think I think there's something to be said about tick tock and reels and future shorts as like, you know, potential ways of learning. Actually, remember, someone had reached out to me with a business idea of I got this listen to this pitch. And it was like, you know, what, if we strung together a bunch of tick tock clips and turn it into like a course, but of course on tick tock, and I was like, Okay, well, you know what Going back to these principles, what's the most important thing is like, how much are you trying to teach in each of those bytes? And actually, I think you can effect you know, pretty effectively learn things, learn skills, from something like tick tock, or YouTube shorts or Instagram reels. I think it's just like thinking about what is the scope of what you're trying to learn? And can you? Can you do it? Now, the one thing is, for a lot of skills, just watching a video is not enough. And so to actually like, master it, you'll need some practice. And so no matter how many Instagram reels I've seen on poaching an egg, I'm really not gonna be able to do it unless I actually get out there and do it. So they can definitely take you. And actually I have like, younger, you know, cousins and things like that. And they'll probably laugh, but like they they are using Tiktok all the time to learn things about like, whether it's wedding planning, or like how to make floral arrangements, or like how to do XYZ. And they're effectively learning this content, you know, and I asked him, like, how did you want to do it like, obviously on Tik Tok? So, I wouldn't dismiss it. I think a lot of people are easy to dismiss some of those things. But there is something to be said about how seamless it is to get into these experiences. How do they surface you know, to your attention? And then how short they are and how narrow in scope they are. And it's not just like, floral arrangements. People are learning really important workplace skills. Like there's a tick tock or corporate, Natalie, people are learning, like, how do you actually give feedback? How do you communicate? How do you manage up? And so that's a very real thing that people are learning. I don't think we're doing enough in the l&d space to actually capitalize on some of the great kind of learning experiences that are coming out there. And I think we're just easy to dismiss them as like, that's just tick tock, you know, they're just dancing, you know? Oh, yeah.

Luis Malbas  
No, it's very interesting, because I do see, um, there are a couple of people like I know, Vanessa, from anchored training has been talking a lot about tick tock. And then even there are, you know, vendors out there in the industry, like, seven taps, who kind of has, its, you know, it's a micro learning platform that that is somewhat popular in our community. So it's interesting to see that. Okay, so we've talked about all these different things. And when I want to wrap it up with this one,

what, what are we getting wrong? With microlearning? Like, what are the things you've talked about what we should do? What What about the things that you're seeing that we definitely should try to avoid? When when we're building out these micro learning courses?

Ali Siddiqui  
Yeah, one of the things that, okay, so there's a couple of things. Okay, I think three, so three things. So number one, is, how it how seamless the experience is, I think one of things we're getting wrong is we're trying to create micro learning experiences, without thinking of the barrier to entry. Having your micro learning experience somewhere deep in the crevices of your LMS. That takes, you know, I think the average, you know, LMS content, it takes like seven to 20 clicks to get into. But if you think about some of the most effective Michael learning experiences, two clicks, you're there three clicks, you know, one of the things that we're getting wrong is where we positioning it, we have to think beyond the learning experience itself. I think this is one of the biggest things we're getting wrong is okay, we are learning designers, we are instructional designers. But we really have to think of the whole user journey. So no one's ever going to get into your experience if it's not positioned in the right place. So that's the first thing. Mobile is a great way to get over this. How to make it mobile friendly, it helps minimize that friction. So that's a huge part. Another part is the learning objective itself. So we talked about this before. But I think the big misconception is people in your organization might just say, y'all, just here's it, here's a three hour course, snip, snip, snip, cut, cut, cut, there you go, micro learning done, you know, but that's the misconception here is, it's all about time. It's about time by design. So you have to design these variants to fit in that five minute chunk. You have to close the learning loop in that five minutes, you can't just randomly cut a long video and make a micro learning. Otherwise, you know, yeah, then then all of YouTube, you know, because now they have chapters is like a micro learning thing. So that's the second piece. The third piece I think we're getting wrong micro learning is how do we how we actually do it. You know, people get so hooked on the time that they're like, here's a five minute article, Terra micro learning, but I think the important thing is, you know, how do you keep people's engagement within even that five minute within that 10 minute so shifting the modality of how you present information is Key. And there, there are studies about, you know, you know, learners attention span. And the common ideas, you know, we referenced earlier, it's like, you know, after seven minutes, it's going to tank. But actually, there's other research to show that, you know, there's a huge drop off after the first 30 seconds. And then after five minutes is another drop off, and then after, you know, seven to nine minutes on that drop off, so shifting the modality of how you present information will help prevent that drop off throughout the course of your say, 10 minute experience. So that's the third thing I think that we're getting wrong is we're just keeping things one modality for getting too hung up on the time part and not about how we're actually engaging learners throughout.

Luis Malbas  
Nice. All right, and I know I said that was gonna be my last question before I wrapped it up. But I do want to ask this one too. Where do you see do you see micro learning evolving? Any further? Do you see it changing at all? And the reason I'm asking that is because I'm just seeing more and more activity from from the AI side of things. Like, for instance, I'm seeing platforms like this one like Crowdcast? Well, this, this specific platform isn't doing it, but other platforms are integrating AI into, into their the recordings where the AI will, like start to it will shorten the recordings, so that they're, they're more, you know, digestible, or whatever. And, and so do you see anything in that's, you know, in that vein, where micro learning is gonna take any, are there any trends that are happening to micro learning where you, you see a changing any, any more in the in the next few years?

Ali Siddiqui  
Yeah, I think, you know, the, the main trend that we're noticing is the kind of the widespread sort of adoption of, of micro learning, you know, and it's not, it's beyond essentially going beyond just the l&d space at the workplace. But even with things like the common like lifestyle, dieting app, or whatever noon, for example, like when they're trying to teach you kind of new things about your diet, etc. Those are all turning into micro learning experiences. How Squarespace, you know, for example, a treat teaches you how to kind of, you know, get used to their, their website, that's also turning into a micro learning experience. So I think we're moved, I think that the general trend is we're moving away from these large, I think when it comes to immediate skills that we need to apply, and immediate skills that are needed in the workplace, we're moving away from these large courses on leadership into extremely specific micro learning experiences on what exactly do I need to know? And then how can I apply it? And I think, I think that's, that's the real trend, I think we're going to start seeing a lot more of that. That kind of content that we would typically see on something like social media, or to become bundled into some very real learning experiences that you might not expect to see in like, a more formal setting. So I think they're onto something there. I think it very much matches the way that we want to learn information in the, you know, in the state of doing something just just in time learning. And I think we should just get ready to embrace it and also be able to utilize it in whatever context we're in. That's fascinating,

Luis Malbas  
because I can I can imagine, you know, since the LDC is really focused on helping instructional designers and l&d professionals in their career. But if you have a focus on micro learning, and being able to build that type of content, potentially, there might be a lot of work out there for you. Because I know for myself, whenever I do get like a new app, or like, especially on the no code side of things like Webflow, I get thrown just these really short form, you know, less than three minute very engaging sort of tutorials on how to do things, and I really, really appreciate that stuff. And, and so, and it sounds like even with Coursera and Coursera clips, it's definitely going in that direction. You

Ali Siddiqui  
know, I yeah, I can think of yeah, just in the l&d space is just getting more and more popular. I can think of a couple of examples like the Chan Zuckerberg Institute, they had funded something that we worked on, that was teaching teachers how to, you know, introduce metacognition in their class, but they're like, We don't want any lesson in this course to be longer than five minutes. So we had to kind of teach metacognition to teachers in a five minute, you know, learning packet and Michael learning experience. I know there was another brief we got Once when I was working at this design firm, which was, listen, we have young millionaires and their Uber going from one building to another building in the city, we want to learn experience that they can complete in their Uber ride from one building to the next, make something like that. And I'm like, this is oddly specific, is a real example. It's like, people are craving shorter and shorter content. And he's just like, we just kind of, really need to figure out, you know, how to how to design for that. So it's a, it's a very real thing, and we're starting to see it a lot more. And yeah, just having these principles in mind, will help us kind of navigate that when it comes up.

Luis Malbas  
Thanks, Ally, you know, I just want to say what I really appreciate about this conversation is, you know, because I have been, you know, I remember micro learning, you know, sort of the word microlearning popping up, like, uh, you know, decade ago, and seeing, you know, at events in places like that, that would, it became like a buzzword, you know, like, micro learning this might, you know, and like, all of a sudden, that was kind of like, the hot thing to talk about was micro learning. And it got to the point where I'm just like ads, just shorter courses. And it was so like, it was kind of annoying, because, you know, it was it was really, it felt like all of it was just like a money play. But you're really taking it from where it's evolved to a very practical application. And and, and I definitely want to have more conversations like this to actually see micro learning. Like that works in action. Right. So, so no, thank you for for joining us today. Rick has one question here. Let's see, are there specific software platforms for developing micro learning?

Ali Siddiqui  
Yeah, well, some of the people that I've spoken to people use things like a lessonly. I've seen that before. Personally, I've used. So once I was working at a company where the goal was to train nonprofit leaders across the globe, and to provide them with free courses. One of the biggest things that we learned from that experience was surprise, no one's really using their desktop, when you're talking about providing nonprofit like experiences to people who are in the rural areas of Malawi, for example, are all using their phones. So we had to convert all of our experiences into mobile friendly, micro learning experiences. And so one thing we use for that was that the software called Ed app, so that was pretty good. It does help you build micro learning experiences that kind of match some of the best practices, we talked about keeping things interactive, minimizing the amount of text. So I would, I would check that out.

Luis Malbas  
Cool. And so I did post a link to lessonly. And then, and then there's a link to seven taps. That is really interesting. Seven taps. Occasionally, we'll run like, contests and stuff through the TLD. See, chat, through our Slack workspace. And there you go. See, are they saying see one called How to with great templates? There you go. And there's Ed app from Holly, thank you. Wow, this is really interesting, I might hit you up again, I'll need to talk about this more, just because I do feel like it has evolved to a point where it's just, I mean, it's might be something that most of us aren't even aware of anymore. Like, it's just, you know, anytime that I'm downloading software and wanting to learn it, there are just these micro learning experiences that I kind of take for granted now, that weren't there, say, like five years ago, right? That's an important part of what an instructional designer should probably learn or need need to know how to build and, and, you know, and to make their to blossom in their career. So, so this is great stuff. Yeah. And so yes, he Oh, yeah. See, I was posting about Jianli. Yes, I've heard of Jean Lee Jean. And again, I'm not even going to try to say Jeanne Lee.

This is great. I am looking forward to being able to break this one down and a transcript and kind of take, I probably am going to pull clips from this one too early. Because there's so many things that you said that was really useful. Oh, here we go. One more question. This one's from Cecilia, what are some best practices in utilizing micro learning principles for compliance trading for health care? Any ideas on that one?

Ali Siddiqui  
Yeah. Utilizing Michael learning experiences for compliance training for health care? I think what I was actually reading a case study about a group a new I think they're the startup and they it's called I think Aris to correct me if I'm wrong, but what they do is they actually work they had a case study where they are working In the healthcare field, and they provided, I think it was surgical technicians with text based micro learning experiences that they get on their phone. So like SMS based, you know, micro learning experiences. And they've had a lot of positive results with sending people like a really bite sized piece of information that they need for their role. Maybe the same can be applied to compliance training, but they really utilized the same framework within text messages, I think there's a stat that like, people are like checking their phones, like once every three minutes or something like that. So the response rate, that seamless UX is definitely there. The one thing that's really come up in healthcare, especially, is the use of checklists, and kind of having your micro learning experience, yes, but then providing people with a tool that they can always refer back to. And that giving them access to that, or having them check in on that regularly and utilize it has been really effective as well. So that's something that I probably keep in mind or just, you know, have in mind as you kind of think about designing those.

Luis Malbas  
So for compliance, in particular, being able to refer back to something might be considered a best practice

Ali Siddiqui  
checklists, having something solid that you can refer back to as an artifact that you can keep with you. You know, that's something that's really anchoring that can really help people. So I think that's, that's pretty helpful. Right? Yeah.

Luis Malbas  
So, oh, gosh, we've got more stuff in chat, but I do actually have to wrap this one up. But Ali, where do people? Um, how can they? Do you have a podcast too? Or what? I can't recall. What, Where did where can people reach out and find you?

Ali Siddiqui  
Um, I would say on my LinkedIn, you know, yeah, people can reach out to me over there. Kind of learn more about my work. I think, maybe next time, we'll do like a deep dive into an actual backland experience. I you know, I'm usually the visuals and PowerPoint guy. No experience or, like, Wait, we're doing a pocket, but I was I can share my screen. Oh, yeah. So next time, we'll keep it a little bit more visual. Do as I say not, as I do, you know, switch up the modalities. give some people some visuals. But um, yeah, they can learn more about me. Through there. You can reach out. Yeah, always open to help. Excellent.

Luis Malbas  
All right. Well, thanks, everybody, for joining us today at some great, great questions in the chat. Really appreciate you taking the time. For those of you that celebrate this week, I hope you have a good holiday week. And don't forget next week, we have the ideal 22 conference. You can register it i DEA fo our idea for learning.com. If you want to join us for our week long event. It's free taking place next week. And with that, Ali, I'm gonna I'm sure I'm gonna follow up with you because this was this was great stuff and I really want to continue exploring this one.

Ali Siddiqui  
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. It was all right. All right. Bye, everybody.

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