Microlearning and Desirable Difficulties

 The most interesting concept of Dr. Bjork's talk is the idea of desirable difficulties. As a trainer and instructional designer, I use Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Evaluation to determine the effectiveness of my courses. For those who are not familiar with Kirkpatrick's model, the four levels can be summarized this way:

First Level - did the learner like the course?
Second Level - did the learner learn from the course?
Third Level - did the learner's behavior change as a result of the course?
Fourth Level - did the organization as a whole benefit from the learner(s) taking the course?

Learners like courses that provide the immediate gratification of learning. That is, learners want to learn something easily and be able to quickly apply the learning. I have to admit that I also like courses where I can immediately apply concepts and tools to my work. Being able to immediately apply training does give the illusion of having learned something. However, without reinforcement, learning quickly fades.

For example, in preparing for the certification as a Senior Professional in Human Resources, I memorized a large list of landmark cases in employee relations. I did the usual study practice of reading the case summaries over and over. That was sufficient for the certification exam but, two years later, I have forgotten most of the list. I did not have the opportunity to practice the cases in real situations nor did I use desirable difficulty techniques to learn the employee relations cases. I had the illusion of learning thanks to massed studying but no long-term real learning.

This is the situation I am seeing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Supervisor Certification Program (SCP). We put supervisors through 24 hours of training in various supervision topics. The courses are mostly lecture with some interaction and role-playing. The current design does not have desirable difficulties. There is a capstone project and refresher training but, according to employee engagement surveys, we could do a much better job training supervisors.

This is why I advocate introducing microlearning into the program. Both before and after the SCP courses. The idea is to use desirable difficulties to prime the students for SCP learning and to reinforce the SCP learning. We accomplish this by presenting short video or podcast scenarios that test the supervisors on several supervisory scenarios that combine several supervisory topics together.
I see this use of microlearning as training the supervisors like the students were trained in throwing into targets that were three feet away. As Dr. Bjork explained, students that were trained on varying distances to the targets did better than students who trained solely on the three-foot target distance. I want to construct the SCP microlearnings in a similar way.