Every day there are new eLearning trends that absolutely must be implemented immediately. What about the Millennials? What about the mobile learner?
What about making sure learning objectives were met? Most importantly, what about the budget? Stop drowning in information, consider this your surfboard, to ride the waves of eLearning trends.
Paddling, Popping up, Carving, and Wave Riding: Four Important eLearning Trends
mLearning
mLearning is mobile learning, which gives your learner the ability to take their training on the go. Learners enjoy the flexibility to take their courses on desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, whenever and wherever they happen to be. A note of caution, mobile accessible is not mobile responsive. Mobile accessible courses can be delivered on any device but the user may need to use that pinch motion to make content larger or smaller so they can read and interact with the content. Mobile responsive courses fully adapt to any screen resolution. No pinch motions are necessary. Buttons and menus are readily available and easy to interact with. Seek clarification when someone says they have mLearning. If it’s not mobile responsive design, it’s going to be an annoying user experience on mobile devices.
Microlearning
Microlearning is targeted learning in small bursts rather than a lengthy course on a topic. For example, suppose I want to learn how to enter basic formulas in Excel. I know how to set up a spreadsheet and format it. I need to know how to add up columns and determine the increase or decrease from the previous month. I could take an hour-long course on Excel for beginners, or…I could take a 10-minute microlearning module on how to do the one thing I need to learn how to do now. This saves learners a lot of frustration and time. That’s why microlearning has become so popular recently.
Learning Paths
In marketing, we talk about this in terms of personalization. Giving learners a personalized path to training, development, advancing one’s career is what learning paths is all about. When we first started talking about this a few years ago, we called this idea Association.edu or competency-based learning. Basically, we’re talking about giving a learner a personalized learning path based on competencies they already have and will need to take the next steps at their organizations.
Collaborative and Social Learning
If a path to success is on the mind of learners in your organization, then part of that path is networking, collaboration, and sharing ideas. How do you make online learning collaborative and social? Adding discussion groups to courses helps learners exchange ideas and problem solve in a collaborative environment. What about networking? There are several ways to do this but among those most popular are social media integration and forums or message boards and chat features.
Ultimately these trends build on each other to create a personalized and convenient learning experience that produces results. Just like surfing, there are many tips and tricks you can implement and learn to make your online education, training, and development the best it can be. However, implementing these four important eLearning trends will have you doing a soul arch in no time.
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