Page 56 - Occupational Health & Safety, November/December 2019

TRAINING
Choosing Microlearning for Safety
Safety managers can make safety training more effective by supplementing formal training methods with microlearning. BY M.B. SUTHERLAND
No matter what the industry, if there’s one word that consistently describes safety man- agers, it’s busy. It takes an incredible amount of attention and juggling to keep track of all
that you do for the people who rely on you to help them stay safe. That level of overload can make crucial tasks like safety training a double-edged sword. It’s beneficial for you and your people, but it takes time out of your busy schedule and theirs.
While most safety managers have a library of training classes that they collect through the years, there will always be new topics and regulations to cover, and it never hurts to offer something your employees haven’t seen before. Safety training can be made easy by downloading ready-to-use pre- sentations from the internet.1 You can make safety training more effective by supplementing your for- mal training with microlearning.
What is Microlearning?
Microlearning is training that’s broken down into short segments—usually between 30 seconds and five minutes long. It’s like a YouTube video.
“If someone wants to learn how to do something super quick, they say, ‘Let’s go to YouTube and find the shortest video!’ Microlearning is similar,” said Dayna Nota, Manager of Training and Development at Magid.
Every safety manager knows it can be hard to keep people’s full attention in safety training, even when you’re talking about matters of life and death. Micro-
learning gets around that by being brief and to the point, and if possible, entertaining.
“Ideally, microlearning should be on a topic you’ve already learned, but in a different format,” Nota said. “It can be hard to remember things from a training class or a conference, so it should be a good refresher. On the flipside, you can also use it as prework before a training session.”
So, if you conducted formal training on lad- der safety, complete with explanations, slides, and hands-on demonstrations, you can follow it up a week later with a quick, microlearning video of lad- der safety reminders.2
The option to send a link can be a “huge benefit for safety managers training their people. You can put it out there once and your workers can watch it over and over and over,” Nota said.
How Does It Keep My Workers Safe?
Microlearning takes advantage of the psychological concept of The Spacing Effect. A study published in the US National Library of Medicine3 found that “infor- mation that is spaced over time is better remembered than the same amount of information massed to- gether.” In other words, cramming for a test helps you remember something for a short period of time. But learning something and then being reminded of what you learned sometime later, and again a while later, and again even later, solidifies the knowledge in your mind and helps you remember it for the long term.
“Repetitiveness is key. The more you hear some- thing, the more you do something, the more it’s going to stick,’ Nota said. “What’s great about microlearn- ing is it gives an opportunity to repeat or preview in- formation without a whole lot of disruption from a learner’s perspective.”
Microlearning vs. Traditional Training
Again, microlearning isn’t meant to replace tradition- al training. It’s meant to supplement formal training to reinforce lessons and act as a timely reminder. How- ever, microlearning segments have the added benefit of working around many of the unavoidable problems you encounter with traditional training.
Microlearning Opportunities
The brief format of microlearning modules makes them incredibly flexible and usable in many ways. You can use them on a regular schedule—like during your daily or weekly toolbox talks or more formal
52 Occupational Health & Safety | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019
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