More on MicroLearning with Bernard

I had an interesting chat with a colleague from class, Bernard, the other day. He mentioned how little time there is in his life for class work and reflection. I know I've written about Microlearning before (see here) and reflective practice (see here) but it's worth bringing up again. 

One of the things I've learned through my classes is the importance of what you brought up, reflective practice. Taking the time for reflection and reflective practice is something that I believe is critical to long term memory development. I've tried to boil down what I've learned to my organization is something that we call the R4 Learning Retention process; Rigor, Relevance, Reinforcement and Reflection. Reflection is the hardest I believe to instill. We can ensure that the courses we create are Rigorous, or challenging enough to engage the learner. We can also provide Relevance through real life scenarios and analysis. Reinforcement is easy to provide through knowledge checks, quizzes and exams, but Reflection is tough. How can we ensure that our learners are thinking about training after they get back to their jobs and families. 

I know that when I am done with courses taking time to write about things, reading from others and applying what I know to their own discussion posts, and just generally taking the time to think about the courses, offers a terrific opportunity for reflection. However we usually only have our learners for a few hours to a day. Rarely do we have a chance to interact with our learners for more than a day. 

Last week I had the opportunity to be a part of a panel discussion on microlearning/spaced learning and chatbots. I think more than any other tool the opportunity that these microlearning/spaced learning or chatbots provide offer us the best chance to engage learners after the fact and perhaps activate that reflective moment for them. I've been stunned by how critical reflection is in learning and long-term memory development and how little it is focus on as a part of my organization's overall learning paradigm.