Learning Bites and Short Courses

When most people think about training it’s with something akin to dread, that or the stoic acceptance that it’s one of life’s necessary evils. Some of us associate training with sitting in a stuffy meeting room while someone drones on and attendees sit with blank uncomprehending faces, wondering how painful their evening commute is going to be. Others might think about swanky offsite training venues with post-training canapés, free booze and a whole lot of work to come back to at the office the next morning.

Then again, perhaps you’re business has embraced online learning. In this case, when you think about training you might have had one of the following experiences. Either, flipping through endless online slides that are about as entertaining as reading through the dictionary A-Z. Or maybe you weren’t lucky enough to get to the content at all, lost in a kind of online limbo searching through and obscure crossword puzzle like interface of obscure techno-jargon vainly trying to find where amongst all the options a simple “Start Here” link is hiding.

The reality is that face-to-face training will always have it’s place in the workforce but there is an awful lot of training that needs to take place but doesn’t fit into this model because it’s just too expensive to deliver. I’m referring to the workplace training and smaller business processes that most people don’t think about too much on a day to day basis. Company know-how that on it’s own wouldn’t constitute a formal course, but is still vital to the running of a company. In many ways this information is just as important as the loftier and more costly leadership training style courses. These processes and small chunks of training might be as simple as how bills are loaded into the accounting system, how to place an expense claim or even how to use the new office dishwasher.

These types of courses are perfect candidates for online learning. Traditional online training courses tend to be structured in modules with multiple topics. First comes the course objectives followed by content, knowledge checkpoints and an assessment. Course administrators load the course into an expensive learning management system which has more features than a swiss army knife which, kind of like the knife, never get used. Then learners spend ages trying to navigate past all the clever features to get access to the course material at which point they’ve run out of time to do any actual learning.The problem with these types of courses is that they are now considered too long and boring and not nearly flexible enough. To top it all off they are really, really expensive to build and maintain.

The idea of Learning Bites is to replace a traditional, structured courses with a collection of smaller bite-sized learning objects that can be pushed out to learners regardless of device and accessed anytime.

Intuto is fully embracing the Learning Bite concept. By letting people use existing content in PowerPoints, embed videos from YouTube and link to downloadable files, creating and sharing Learning Bites is easy. By stripping out all the unnecessary features and making the way people access online courses easier and mobile friendly, not only can online training be cost effective, it can also be fun!

We’re currently running a poll on the launch page so you can tell us how you think this new type of course should be referred to inside intuto. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Also, check out the infographic below and take a look at number four and see some of the other trends disrupting learning.

Find more education infographics on e-Learning Infographics