L&D Best Practices

Distance learning is accessible anytime, anywhere

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Distance learning

Employees nowadays live in highly disruptive times, confronted with major changes in their working life. Besides their daily tasks and responsibilities, they are also learners. Learners who are faced with an information overload, a digital tsunami and above all, a limited amount of time. In order to seize all the opportunities learning has to offer, learning must be able to occur anywhere, at any time and take into account the constraints of the individual. Let’s see what distance learning can offer!

Distance learning is growing on mobile

You won’t have any chance to be competitive in the e-learning field if you do not adapt to this tendency and if your contents are not available on smartphones and mobile Internet devices. This is a prerequisite and a major challenge for all the actors involved in the e-learning business.

A highly respected CrossKnowledge faculty Member, Amber Dailey-Hebert, describes very well the new learning context : learners have other daily tasks and responsibilities, not only learning. Besides, people are faced with an information overload. « Did you know that the rate of information has tripled in the last 3 years alone ? ». People are overloaded with tools and need guidance to « learn how to learn in the digital age ».

A personalized microlearning approach

Theo Hug, researcher at the University of Insbruck, explores the possibilities of storytelling and narration in his survey The Micro Learning and Narration Exploring possibilities of utilization of narrations and storytelling for the designing of « micro units » and didactical micro-learning arrangements.

He thus describes « micro learning »: microlearning forms an answer for learner’s challenges. Microlearning facilitates learning with smaller learning units and short-term-focused activities (Hug, 2015).

As Hug states, repetitive learning through embedding the learning process into daily routines is highly effective. New learning spaces emerge by making use of different communication devices, which enables life long learning.

You boost the learner experience by offering so-called learning nugget in a ATAWADAC style: Any Time, Any Where, Any Device, Any Content. Amber Dailey-Hebert also stresses the importance of microlearning. “To seize the full opportunity that digital learning has to offer, prepare chunked, bit-seized learning”, says Amber.

You need to select only content that is relevant to you. Create your own personalized on-demand learning library, by piling up interesting learning content that you can easily retrieve. By means of one mobile device (tablet, phone, application) you can create your daily learning journey by consuming bite-sized learning content on the train, waiting for your next meeting or right-after your lunch.

Here are some benefits of m-learning