As technology continues to affect how we take in information and process it, so does the approach by which we learn. The term “Microlearning” is becoming an often used term in education as we learn how behavior is changing in the pursuit of knowledge for skills sake.

Consider how you might seek information nowadays on how to conduct a relatively unique skill like cleaning a lint vent on your household dryer. In previous generations, you might have to travel to the library and seek a text on home maintenance by way of the card catalog. How about calling a subject matter expert (handyman) and asking for a description over telephone.

Contrast to now how you would simply sit down in front of a computer terminal and type “cleaning a lint vent” in an internet search engine and BOOM, 6000 sources of information. The most popular or relevant are automatically indexed at the top of the response list. You see a video posted on YouTube and decide that’s a good start. The first video you open is 13 minutes long and covers 12 steps though. The next you see on the list aside the video player is only 5 minutes. That’s the one! Click….and 5 minutes later you know enough and remember the 3 steps it mentions. From here you take your newfound skills and work through the task in a few minutes of work.

There are some other terms for this such as JITL or “Just In Time Learning” but really its very similar if not just the same thing. Our behavior and the way we seek information has been changing rapidly. I am a Gen X baby. I have experienced the transition from minimal tech in learning up to the level of tech we are using now and it has shaped me monumentally. But even though my knowledge seeking behavior has advanced past sitting and reading tomes for hours at a time to gather information about skills I am not really using right now to find what I need, why hasn’t the aviation industry? I refer in particular to regulatory requirements for recurrent training in an FAA part 135 or 121 operator.

In my experience as a flight operations training professional, I have found that most training programs are very “modulized”. For example, flight crews are trained on basic indoctrination subjects such as “aviation weather” or “HAZMAT” or “Regulations” in 2 hour sittings using review courses. These are essentially out of context digital textbooks delivered via some form of Computer Based Training (CBT) that immediately shows proof that the skills are reviewed via a quiz or test of multiple choice questions. After completion, magically the crews are “trained” and off they go into the wild blue yonder with their newly refreshed knowledge.

However, after being in training roles within the industry I have found that might not be quite the case. Many of the CBT methods are easy to manipulate and work around so you don’t actually have to spend much time extending mental effort to complete the module. Just click your way through the slides, answer some very simple quiz questions about the material and meet some sort of time requirement based on training manual guidelines. When you are done , you are officially “trained” and really not much more is heard about the subject. Don’t get me wrong, you can gain valuable knowledge from these modules if you actively engage yourself. I usually read and research while I am doing these courses because I really like to know the material. However, I could simply click and quiz if I wanted to disengage and pass just fine.

Basically it forces us to sit and read a digital text for 2 hours at a time which is exactly what we are conditioning ourselves away from in informal knowledge seeking. If you asked me to sit and read that home maintenance manual for two hours until i covered enough supporting info about home systems before a few steps on how to clean the vents, sorry i am outta here!

How can we harness this behavior change into aviation training? I find myself constantly seeking microlearning snippets to perform tasks and build my knowledge in aviation throughout the year. Really, it covers a lot of the subject matter required for recurrent training. I am losing count of how often I need to reference the regs informally. I’d like to be able to count that towards my required 2 hours of reg training every year! I read message boards, watch videos, and reference the text also. However, no credit issued. I sit in front of the same CBT program and click and quiz!

There is a time and place for the CBT provided reg review though. I cannot be assured that I have reviewed some of the more obscure regs that I forget every year due to non-usage. A little more context would fit better via storytelling or scenarios but those take time to develop. I would like to fit this content into more of a spread out means such as regular “Did You Know” microlearning modules that take only a few minutes. Tracking those along with whatever I have reviewed via self directed research would fit how my knowledge seeking behavior has been changing. My yearly regs review would likely exceed two hours in this case, and it wouldn’t be a 2 hour click and quiz session!

The good news is I think this can be done! New technology in learning tracking is providing a method for organizations to track ALL learning both formal and informal. Its the same technology that marketing has been using to track your web behavior and provide suggested products to the right people. Using this technology we could track behavior throughout the year and prove that everything related to regulations review credits to your two hours. Of course, you would need to have some structure to ensure all the appropriate obscurities that need reviewed are actually reviewed. Active tasks being sent out all through the year would cover that though. I think that is where the “Did You Know” type mini tasks would come into play.

The tech is called “Tin Can API” and it works with a Learning Records Store (LRS). I could easily “geek out” on this topic and I will another day. But I see REALLY great application to recurrent training in the future.

Overall, aviation needs to evolve to meet the behavior of the learners. There are more than a few hurdles to clear but the scope of this blog is not that broad. If we can channel the direction of the content towards the behavior of the learner i think we may find that skills are actually improved! After all, that is what “training” is supposed to be, isnt it?