Why businesses are turning to bite-sized learning

When Pana­son­ic noticed that its call-cen­tre staff were find­ing it hard to recall all the tech­ni­cal details it expect­ed them to learn about its huge range of prod­ucts, the elec­tron­ics giant realised it had a prob­lem that has long been dis­cussed in train­ing cir­cles. 

This is the awk­ward fact that, when humans sup­pos­ed­ly learn some­thing, it’s a tem­po­rary affair at best. Sev­er­al stud­ies have shown that half of any new infor­ma­tion impart­ed is for­got­ten with­in a day and up to three-quar­ters can be lost in a week. After a month, very lit­tle is retained at all. That’s a whole lot of train­ing bud­get van­ish­ing into thin air.

“Typ­i­cal­ly, we’d put new recruits through three weeks of class­room-based prod­uct train­ing,” says Panasonic’s gen­er­al man­ag­er of cus­tomer care in Europe, Bruce Swan. “But we realised that, if they didn’t receive enquiries about a par­tic­u­lar prod­uct straight away, their reten­tion of that learn­ing would soon peter out.” 

The company’s solu­tion was to devel­op and, in part­ner­ship with cloud-based knowl­edge and learn­ing plat­form Fuse, deliv­er what is now approach­ing 2,000 bite-sized units of on-demand learn­ing. Each one lasts only three to five min­utes, enabling learn­ers to ‘snack’ and then move on to the next one.

Bite-sized learn­ing has its crit­ics, who deride it for pan­der­ing to the short atten­tion spans of the social media gen­er­a­tion and argue that it does lit­tle to devel­op a deep under­stand­ing among users. But Swan and oth­ers are prov­ing that this for­mat is more effec­tive than the con­ven­tion­al approach. 

“Strip­ping the learn­ing right back forced us to define the spe­cif­ic knowl­edge we want­ed peo­ple to retain,” he says. “We found that course pass rates increased by 17% and the reten­tion of infor­ma­tion by our agents improved by 10% over­all.”

The key to the suc­cess of bite-sized learn­ing cen­tres on what neu­ro­sci­en­tists call spac­ing the­o­ry – a refine­ment of the work of Ger­man psy­chol­o­gist Her­mann Ebbing­haus in the 1880s. From his research, he con­clud­ed that learn­ers’ reten­tion of infor­ma­tion will drop to 40% with­in days unless they review that mate­r­i­al repeat­ed­ly.

“Bio­log­i­cal­ly, bite-sized learn­ing suits the brain’s first require­ment to deal with small pack­ets of infor­ma­tion at a time,” says e‑learning expert Leon Hady, a for­mer head­teacher who trans­formed the per­for­mance of an inner-city school. 

Ryan Chynces, senior man­ag­er of online edu­ca­tion at Hoot­suite, agrees, adding: “Where bite-sized learn­ing excels is that it recre­ates the ‘spac­ing’ that learn­ers need, because it’s designed to be returned to again and again. It may sound per­verse, but a small chunk of infor­ma­tion actu­al­ly becomes hard­er for the brain to remem­ber over time. But the learner’s effort of going back and retriev­ing that mate­r­i­al makes it eas­i­er for them to recall it lat­er down the line.”

In essence, then, the key task of those design­ing bite-sized con­tent is to make the mate­r­i­al engag­ing enough to make learn­ers want to return to it and deep­en their knowl­edge in the process. 

This is exact­ly what hap­pens with the e‑learning that Hady pro­vides: learn­ers return to his mate­r­i­al three times on aver­age. Mean­while, 60% of Panasonic’s call-cen­tre work­ers are going back to its bite-sized con­tent in their own time and on their own devices, even though they aren’t oblig­ed to.

A broad­er ben­e­fit of bite-sized learn­ing is that it’s eas­i­er for busy peo­ple to fit around their oth­er activ­i­ties. This fac­tor has proved use­ful to pub and hotel oper­a­tor Marston’s. 

“Get­ting our pre­dom­i­nant­ly shift-based teams all togeth­er at once isn’t prac­ti­cal,” explains the group’s head of learn­ing and devel­op­ment, Jane Mur­ray. “What can do with our bite-sized approach is extend learn­ing to 8,000 peo­ple almost simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. We find that they sim­ply start open­ing the con­tent imme­di­ate­ly, as if they were con­sum­ing mate­r­i­al on social media.”

To pre­pare its fur­loughed employ­ees for their return to work after the Covid clo­sures, Marston’s sent out bite-sized learn­ing mod­ules, designed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Nor­we­gian start­up Atten­si, on top­ics such as how to dis­cuss menus and han­dle cus­tomers’ queries. None of these mod­ules was more than two min­utes long. Their con­tent mixed pure infor­ma­tion with games and mul­ti­ple-choice quizzes to test learn­ers’ com­pre­hen­sion. 

Users had to play the con­tent an aver­age of 2.3 times before they were cer­ti­fied as pass­ing the course, but many played it four times or more because they enjoyed the activ­i­ties, accord­ing to Mur­ray. 

“We know that our learn­ers’ reten­tion of this infor­ma­tion has improved,” she says. “After their first play, their aver­age score was 61%. By the time they achieved cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, the aver­age was 93%.”

Such results rep­re­sent a chal­lenge to more tra­di­tion­al forms of train­ing. As Paul Wakel­ing, exec­u­tive direc­tor of cur­ricu­lum and qual­i­ty at The Skills Net­work, notes: “Bite-size learn­ing is decep­tive­ly effec­tive because peo­ple tend to want to binge on many mod­ules in one sit­ting, just as they might with Tik­Tok videos.” 

Whether it will replace tra­di­tion­al longer-form e‑learning or even face-to-face meth­ods is a moot point. 

“We’ve reduced our class­room train­ing at Pana­son­ic to three days now,” Swan reports. But, even though the firm’s cus­tomer-sat­is­fac­tion rat­ings are sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than they were before it intro­duced bite-sized learn­ing, he and oth­ers do not fore­see the end of tra­di­tion­al meth­ods just yet. 

“The func­tion of com­ing togeth­er face to face will be dif­fer­ent,” Swan pre­dicts. “That for­mat will be more about shar­ing knowl­edge and dis­cussing things fur­ther.” 

Mur­ray believes that bite-sized learn­ing will “become sig­nif­i­cant at Marston’s, but it won’t replace crit­i­cal think­ing and con­ver­sa­tions”. 

But, with both also report­ing that employ­ees are using bite-sized learn­ing as a way to explore oth­er career paths their com­pa­nies can offer them, it’s clear that more real­ly is being done with less. The small­er the snack, the more it seems to sat­is­fy.