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Kapp, K. M., & Defelice, R. A. (2019). Microlearning: Short and Sweet. American Society for Training and Development.

McNeill, L., & Fitch, D. (2022). Microlearning through the Lens of Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction: A Qualitative Study. TechTrends, 67(3). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-022-00805-x

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Comprehensive Guide to Philodendron Care: Light, Water, Nutrition, and Pest Control for In-Store Maintenance

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Created by Niamh Weekes, with the magic of 7taps AI

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Going back to the learner personas I created in Assignment 2, this proved to be a great way of maintaining a learner centred approach throughout the design and development of the prototype. Additionally, I revisited my modular framework to scope what topics should be addressed. Where the initial onboarding module was broken down in to Light, Water, Nutrition and Pest Control guidance for all products offered in store, this resource targets a single plant family/family of products that the store carries, and details its specific light, water, nutrition and pest control needs. Since this resource sits outside the Onboarding programme, it does not need to align exactly with one module's content.

Ideally to scope this kind of learning initiative, I would try to gain feedback via surveys from, or hold focus groups with, employees in-store. This would provide insight into staff needs and frequent blockers to productivity on the shop floor. Survey data and responses from focus groups would be the first step in building employee enablement resources like this. Responses from management would also inform the learning initiative in the scoping phase.

Note that there is only one learning outcome for this activity. Microlearning can only be catered to a single learning outcome, and must be intentionally designed with this in mind (Kapp & Defelice, 2019).

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Choosing 7taps to create this piece of learning led me to wireframe a very linear flow for the content. While it is important to not allow a tool or technology to lead design, I felt this structure made sense for such a short piece of instruction on a topic.

It was interesting to look at Gagne's Nine Events of instruction to create microlearning. I was initially concerned that my learning activity would not be able to encompass all nine events, however it is not necessary for each event to be present for learning to happen (McNeill & Fitch, 2022). For example, 'Stimulating Recall of Prior Knowledge' (McNeill & Fitch, 2022) is not a relevant event for a recap resource, where learners are coming to a piece of content to address a knowledge gap. While the resource will likely refresh their memory on content they have looked at in the past and aid retrieval, they are not being presented with new information for which providing stimulus of prior knowledge would be helpful.

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I chose to combine the screenplan and storyboard in the design phase, since the nature of a rapid development tool like 7taps allows learning activities to come together very quickly, without need for an extensive screenplanning or storyboarding. The drawback of this however, is that scope for visual design is somewhat limited, since there is very little functionality for modifying layout or visuals in each screen.

This tool is advantageous for both accessibility and microlearning, as it does not allow the designer to add more content than can be comfortably visible on a mobile device. When looking at the emphasis on brevity in microlearning (Kapp & Defelice, 2019), this is beneficial in building content, ensuring only small ‘chunks’ of information are visible in each screen.

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I was able to develop a prototype in a fraction of the time of other eAuthoring tools, and test it across mobile and laptop devices right away. Staff will be using tablets during onboarding and mobile phones when working, so testing across Google Chrome, Safari, and Samsung browsers was needed. 7taps is an ideal tool for building mobile learning, with a perfectly compatible resolution (720px × 1200px) and simple navigation.

When reviewing the prototype, I tested the learning experience with two main use cases in mind:

1.      Employee refreshing on the care of philodendron plants, and wanting to review each topic presented.

2.      Employee wanting to query a specific aspect of a topic, i.e. troubleshooting watering issues, on the shop floor.

For the first use case, this content works well to recap on the care of the plant and product information. For the second, I believe a piece of content with branching or chapters may benefit the employee more, when they are in the flow of work. For example, if the employee wants to query an aspect of pest control, they will need to skip all the way to the end of the content to find their answer, and not go straight to the section they are looking for. Since this learning is very short, this is not a major issue. However it is not optimal as an enablement resource in this way. Having built this content with an unpaid plan, branching functionality was not available. A paid plan with this feature however would create a better learning experience for staff.

Another limitation of this tool, or at least the tool experience at the unpaid level, was the lack of visual customisation options on a slide by slide basis. I would have liked to visually group the resource's sections with different colours or graphics (as I had done for the Wireframe) to orient the learner within the resource. For example, visually distinguishing the Water section from Light. There was very little scope for this in the tool with the account I had.

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Figure 1: Structure of Botanica digital learning initiative

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Botanica will be introducing microlearning to supplement its digital learning strategy and provide support to staff in-store. I have built an on-demand and concise 7taps eLearning resource for guidance on different day to day tasks in store, that staff can reference in the flow of work. This micro-course will look at a single plant type in-store, and detail its individual needs based on Light, Water, Nutrition and Pest Control. In the image above (Figure 1), you can see how this resource sits outside of the Onboarding Programme, but within the overall digital learning initiative to be implemented in Botanica. In the future microlearning resources will also be used to introduce new products that arrive in-store to ramp up employees on the necessary product knowledge.

This will supplement the existing Onboarding programme detailed in Assignment 2, and will take a more informal learning component. The learner is choosing to use this resource at the time of need, and there is no requirement to complete. It is not 'pushed' to the learner (Kapp & Defelice, 2019).