Microlearning Design: Build Short Lessons That Stick [EN]

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Short lessons do not work because attention spans collapsed. The same people watch three-hour breakdowns and finish ten-episode series in a weekend.

Cutting a long course into pieces produces a long course in pieces

That is the mistake almost everyone makes first, and it changes nothing, because length was never the variable. What actually decides whether learning survives is repetition and proximity to the moment of use. A forty-minute lesson watched once and never reopened loses most of itself inside a week. Five minutes returned to on the day the skill is needed loses almost nothing. Which means microlearning is not a shorter version of the same design — it is material designed backwards from the moment somebody has to do the thing.

What this course covers

Thirty-four lessons, starting with why any of this works. The learning science first: how adults take in information, ADDIE, defining the end result before designing anything, mapping the learner journey, what a piece of learning is made of, the nine steps and the bottlenecks between them, the importance of repetition, sixteen factors that decide whether knowledge reaches actual work, the power of reminders, performance support and the options for delivering it, evaluation in six steps, the difference between training somebody and developing them, the learning organisation model, and automation. Then where short units come from: explicit against tacit knowledge, extraction through interviews and working groups, structuring into a base or a wiki, communities of practice, embedding knowledge in the workflow so it arrives at the moment of use, and measuring whether anybody opens it. Then production, which is the part that stopped being expensive: platforms, course generation, materials, video and tests at volume, adapting one piece of material to several learning styles, personalised paths, and analytics. Then the prompting craft underneath that: what the model can and cannot do, ready-made templates for repeated tasks, building your own assistant on top of your own documents, rewriting to a required style, short summaries and structuring, studying a topic through dialogue, and composite prompts for precise output. Finally the mechanics that get short material opened at all: low-budget gamification with no platform, recognition against prizes, behaviour shaped rather than requested, certificates and completion.

Four of the five blocks were recorded for a corporate audience

I would rather say this now than have you notice it in lesson nine. The learning science block is a course for someone running a learning function, and six of its ten lessons speak about organisations — needs assessment, reporting to management, succession. The other four are about how a human being absorbs and applies something, and those four are the reason this course exists, because nowhere else in my material do the nine steps, the sixteen transfer factors and performance support appear together. The knowledge block was recorded about corporate expertise and is used here for a narrower purpose: where short units come from, and where they have to sit to be found in the relevant minute. The AI and gamification blocks were recorded for workplace learning. One block, the prompting one, was recorded for a general audience and belongs to nobody in particular.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 34 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the nine steps of learning, the sixteen transfer factors, the performance support options, the design and diagnostic checklists, the knowledge capture methods, the AI production stack, and the composite prompt structure

• The evidence base behind short formats, rather than a rule about how long a video should be

Where to start

Take the last thing you taught and write down the exact moment somebody has to use it. Then ask whether your material is available at that moment or forty minutes before it. Enrol now and start today.