What Is The Digital Financial system?
Give your employees quick answers
The “digital economy” is a term we normally associate with blockchains and cryptocurrency. But the truth is that digital learning is also a part of the digital economy. Understanding how on-demand learning and microlearning fit into the digital economy and, to some extent, are a response to how the digital economy has shaped human behavior will help you understand how best to use these forms of learning can.
What is the digital economy?
To put it simply, the digital economy is a term used to describe the production and consumption processes in the digital sphere. In practice this is a very complex world. It covers questions such as “How long are people willing to watch a video when they see it on social media?” And “How much money are people willing to spend on a phone app?” And includes each exchange, that takes place on the web, from making an Amazon purchase to an email newsletter subscription to using social media and any other way that consumers interact with digital goods and content.
How the digital economy is changing the way people interact with content
In the digital economy, attention is one of the most valuable human resources. Producers are constantly seeking consumer attention through content, be it a cooking video with an ad in the middle, an Instagram post hoping for lots of likes and comments, or an article (like this one!) To educate consumers about what the Manufacturers have to offer.
In response, consumers are doing their best to maintain their attention resources. They do this by not watching long videos, skimming articles instead of reading them in depth, opening emails, and scrolling the web as quickly as possible without being attracted to something else that isn’t related to their job has to do. They even spend money to conserve their attention resources by buying apps to block ads, buying apps that promise to reduce their email clutter, and so on and so on.
As a backlash, producers try to create content that deserves consumer attention and engagement. They do this by creating content that:
- Concise
- Hyper-relevant
- Using formats that are easy to skim through
- Useful immediately
- High quality in production
- Offering something to the consumer – be it knowledge, cultural capital, discounts or more
- Accessible wherever and whenever the consumer is
- Using psychology to be addicting and provocative
In the digital arena, that means consumers take in a lot of content quickly and quickly scroll past content unless it proves relevant and useful at first glance. They also skip or skim longer content.
How the digital economy is changing learning
As the way people interact with content has changed, educational content must also change to keep up with these new forms of interaction.
Compare the above characteristics of content created for the digital economy with the characteristics of traditional learning methods:
- Sessions from 45 minutes to an hour
- The range of information is broad and profound
- Should be useful later – it cannot be used at the moment of need
- Lecture-based – missing video, image or sound production
- According to the manufacturer’s schedule, not the consumer’s schedule
Micro-learning and on-demand learning are inventions created to have more of the characteristics that digital business-friendly content possesses. More concise content available anywhere, anytime on hyper-specific topics makes it usable by a group of consumers who are not interested in content that is not immediately useful and does not fit into their lives.
Think of it this way: when people have questions about what to do, they turn to Google for quick answers. On-demand learning and micro-learning want to be the educational version of these quick answers for corporate workers. Delivering this content enables employees to access the company-approved best practices for everything from programming to customer relationships to chopping tomatoes. If employees need to consult notes from a seminar they attended two years ago or scroll through an hour-long presentation to find the exact moment the training provided an answer, they likely won’t do so at all and will likely leave Go your own way or turn to other resources that may not contain the correct information.
The importance of data in the digital economy
One aspect of the digital economy that we haven’t touched on yet is data. Data determines so much of how producers create content. Many producers know everything about how users interact with their content: page views, how long they have viewed a page or watched a video, whether or not they have bought a product and much more. They also use data combined with AI to do some of their work for them and deliver relevant content to users.
Data is also an important part of the role that micro-learning and on-demand learning play in the digital economy. Understanding your users is key to meeting many content needs that deserve users’ attention. With a high quality digital learning platform, data is easy to track.
For example, by determining whether users are finishing a particular micro-tutorial video, you can get clues as to whether that topic is relevant to users or of reasonable length. Knowing what topics people click most often can help you determine what content could be removed and what content your reps need more. Digital learning is also beginning to leverage the use of AI to present users with courses that are relevant to the other courses they are interested in.
It is important to note that no data collection can replace the human element. Getting to know your employees and talking to them about their needs for professional development will have a greater positive effect than millions of data points. In this way, learning content is very different from most in the digital economy. You, the producer, have a real relationship with the consumer – your employees. However, data can be a useful way to get a picture of problem areas in a learning ecosystem that can have hundreds and thousands of users.
Ask yourself: How does your content compete in the digital economy?
Educational content is digital like everything else. When you think about the digital economy as a whole, you can think about how your own content fits in with it. If you find that your content is not very competitive, then micro-learning and on-demand learning are a great place to start to adapt your digital learning to the new landscape.
