Micro Learning - Knowledge in Four Minutes or Less with @intellectus_kc

I've just run into Joseph O'Malley's session on Micro-Learning. Given my fascination with YouTube and things like 50 Lessons, this is a topic I'm quite interested in. So I'll just liveblog what I'm learning. Joseph seems to be a very entertaining guy, given the conversation he's striking before the talk begins. So I think the session (which is a full house) will be entertaining to say the least. Joseph is the senior director of knowledge for St Luke's Health System. Directors go to project meetings and take credit for others work. He's an average person who wants to do great work and wants to share. He hopes that we can take his experience and make it work for us. So we're sitting back and relaxing and letting him drive. His session is called 'How Britney Spears inspired learning innovation..." - LOL! St Luke's is a non-profit and the IT training team has three elearning programmers and four classroom instructors. In healthcare, there's a strong case for instructor led training and these guys take care of the entire life cycle of the learning.

The challenge is that of time. Any time in elearning or training is time away from work. People in Joseph's session get ideas from many places, but this idea came from celebrity gossip! That's how Britney got involved in all this. Britney is unleashed and Joseph promises that you'll see her everywhere because of him. Joseph claims that his inspiration came from the Britney Spears umbrella incident where she had a bad day, shaved her hair and then attacked a papparazi's car using an umbrella. So Joseph's team got onto the web looking for the video and went to CNN and they noticed how the videos are just a few minutes long - two and half minutes at an average. If news agencies can educate the public on important topics in less than three minutes, Joseph's team should be able to do it four, shouldn't they?

So what is micro-learning?
The ability to provide short snippets of education electronically. They called it Knowledge Nuggets - memorable education delivered in four minutes or less. Joseph's urging us in his really funny way to not get caught up in who invented the term or the definition. So for the project they decided they wanted a large audience, geographically distributed. The topics would be high level concepts, detailed, step-by-step instructions wouldn't work. Minimum, simple retention and application of basic knowledge. The time limit was just four minutes and they were strict on themselves. That said post-tests and knowledge checks were outside this our minute time limit.
The Problem
St Luke's approach to quality improvement is called PI and they want all employees to have an awareness of it. They provided this education during new hire orientation and it used to be a 30 minute lesson delivered all in Powerpoint and the fact is that it didn't work. Only 6% could name the stages of PI correctly and the remaining 94% didn't know about it at all. Not good, eh? So what did that education look like - it was a 41 slide bullet point fiesta with a questions slide at the end! For better or for worse, Joseph's team used ADDIE to guide them through the development process. Here were the problems:

• Too complicated - too much information up front.
• There was no branding - the PI model didn't have links to strong images
• There was no context - no simple story to understand how they could use it.
• There was no St Luke's - the education needed a familiar element

So Joseph's team grabbed people from the steering committe and came up with education objectives and put a set of design objectives to keep it simple, engaging and short. David will now show us what he pitched to PI steering committee of St Lukes. He explained the micro learning concept, the simplicity and the intent to keep it engaging, humourous and fun. More importantly they decided to use real St Luke's people as actors. They went with some real graphics, real storyboards, tangible proofs of concept that helped the leadership understand what they were upto. They actually used real sketches to explain to the leadership what they were trying to do. Joseph's stuff looks like a really great story, helicopters on the hospital, a big problem and a crack team coming together to solve the problem. How the team actually came together and put together the solution modelled the different phases of the PI approach, a nice headfake to learn how the approach actually works. The management loved it but didn't believe that the team could do it in four minutes. They had a request - they wanted a knowledge check at the end of the module. They also had to have a compromise to use a funny mnemonic - Polka Dots Make Animals Itch. This is ridiculous to me, and for Joseph's team this didn't fit their story. They decided that they'll do two knowledge checks. One would be a high-powered executive PI Game. The other knowledge check would be Luke a dog with polka dots.

Joseph's now going to now show us the actual knowledge nugget. The video looks really slick, but nothing you can't do with a little bit of effort. It's humorous and is very similar to the approach that common craft follows with their videos. The story they've got up there is not just funny but also attractive and engaging and it does end in four minutes. Joseph is showing us the knowledge check and the fact is that even without the knowledge check people were able to apply the model. The Luke dog polka dots knowledge check is really funny - if you get things right, the dog stops scratching and is happier. The PI executive game looks even cooler - they actually had people in leadership roles playing actors because they believe in this thing. This is a great example of how leadership involvement can be really effective. The leadership people were happy to do ridiculous gigs to support this. They used real people's voices too to give it that little extra. I'm so impressed - this is way cool stuff. They even gave their actors credit. The fact is that you can do stuff like this in Powerpoint.

What were their results?
94% of the employees who viewed the knowledge nuggest passed the post test on the first try. The course satisfaction score was 4.89/5.00. After 6 months 96% knew what PI was, 94% were able to cite the room signage story from the video as an example. 68% could list the five phases in the correct order. All this for 44 hours of effort creating the video, 28 hours to create the executive PI game and 14 hours to create the Luke game. The tools they used were digital cameras, Flash, Photoshop, Sound Booth and After Effects. Investing in things like pen tablets made things really easy. They've done more knowledge nuggets ever since like "What is Knowledge Management", stuff around the influenza vaccine, ER trauma, patient safety, etc.

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Joseph has really encouraged us to look out for inspiration just as their inspiration was Britney and I think this was one of the best presentations at the conference. You can follow him on twitter too.