Microlearning and scenarios are two highly effective strategies for delivering e-learning content and achieving your training and development objectives. Microlearning involves presenting content to learners in short bursts, with each burst focusing on a single piece of information. Scenarios are where you present learners with life-like situations to facilitate the learning process. In other words, scenarios are the digital form of classroom-based role-playing activities<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For some training topics, you can improve outcomes and the learning experience by combining scenarios with microlearning. This is largely because of the way our brains work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Microlearning focuses each module in an e-learning course on a specific idea or piece of information. This enables the learner to achieve a single objective within the brain’s attention span and memory capacity. As a result, microlearning is ideal for cognitive skills learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cognitive skills learning is one of the ways that our brains learn. Tapping into this part of the brain is sufficient for many hard skills, but what about people skills and emotional skills?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Microlearning often isn’t enough on its own when delivering training on topics focused on people and emotional skills. You instead need something that taps into that part of a learner’s brain, i.e., the parts of the brain that are about behavioural learning and emotional learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One option is to abandon microlearning as a strategy, reverting to a more traditional, long-form approach instead. With a long-form approach, you will have more scope and flexibility to create meaningful scenarios.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, going down this route means losing the benefits of microlearning. The alternative is to combine scenarios with microlearning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By including scenarios in your microlearning course, you can add nuance to the training and help learners see more clearly how the content applies to their day-to-day reality. This leads to behavioural change and can improve situational awareness, people skills, and a range of different soft skills that are becoming more and more important in the modern workplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ability to create e-learning courses that tap into the brain\u2019s cognitive, behavioural, and emotional learning abilities is a compelling reason to combine scenarios with e-learning. That said, there are other benefits when utilising both strategies in your e-learning courses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scenarios bring content to life and makes it more real to learners. It also helps learners understand how the skills and knowledge they are being taught can be applied on the job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Designing scenarios that are suitable for microlearning courses requires specialist expertise, but the ability to add authenticity and context significantly improves the quality of the e-learning course.<\/p>\n\n\n\nEnabling Cognitive, Behavioural, and Emotional Learning<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Other Benefits of Combining Scenarios and Microlearning<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Makes the Content More Authentic and Adds Context<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Improves the Learner Experience<\/h3>\n\n\n\n