TinCan API sparks: Bite-sized Learning

Like many corporate learning departments, ours spends a substantial amount of effort creating and delivering mandatory learning programs. Fire Safety, Infection Control, and Corporate Compliance are just a few of the required activities taken by thousands of people every year. Because they affect so many people, it would be nice if they were as relevant, interesting and responsive to changing institutional priorities as they are ubiquitous.

One idea that came up in a recent brainstorming session on the problem, was to allow learners to choose between a variety of new methods of taking their yearly requirements, methods that TinCan might make possible.
One of those new delivery modes might be a weekly email containing just one highly relevant, “drawn from the headlines” story and question. That question could be answered right there in their email, in about the time it would take to post to Twitter.

The learner would receive immediate, useful feedback, be shown their current standing (how many left to do), and would also be offered related learning opportunities, in similar bite-sized fashion, somewhat like YouTube offers related videos.

The “mini-mandatory” doesn’t have to be an email: it could also be an SMS, a robocall survey, a startup item that appears when they log in, or maybe even something on a touchscreen in a public place.

Learners wouldn’t have to respond to every one of these questions to fulfill their yearly quota – just a percentage, and mixing and matching between modes would be allowed.

At any given time, the content could be changed rapidly as new priorities or initiatives come up, and perhaps we could even design them to be adaptive.