ChatGPT is known to churn out powerful and relevant content. While ChatGPT can be integrated with a microlearning platform using APIs, the more important questions are:
(1) What ChatGPT can do for you
(2) Using ChatGPT AI for microlearning, and
(3) Integrating ChatGPT with a microlearning platform.
What ChatGPT does
You can use AI tool like ChatGPT 3.5 version or version 4 to get the content for your microlearning initiatives. ChatGPT uses web scraping to collect data from various sources on the internet such as Wikipedia, books, scientific journals, news articles, etc., using complex algorithms. It is reliable to the extent of over 97% with content that’s valid till 2021. It doesn’t have live access to internet. Instead, ChatGPT is an extremely high-quality ‘database’ driven by AI. Plus, the data it contains till 2021 is quite sufficient to generate great content!
A few things ChatGPT can do very easily includes-
- Help you generate ideas for you as per the instructions or contexts you define and give you enough material to brainstorm.
- Allow you to give ‘parameters’ of the kind of content you need, its framework (outline), its length, its format, the level of difficulty, the targeted audience (traits/characteristics), the design and much more.
- The flexibility to refine and improve the content by re-asking questions and making changes to your ‘prompts’ (instructions). A prompt can be a question, statement, or partial sentence that gives ChatGPT the feed to understand your intent to generate responses.
While ChatGPT can provide you the content, how to refine and create the structure of your microlearning lesson needs to be your call.
ChatGPT opens up unimaginable possibilities to help you brainstorm any topic from different angles.
- A few tips on what you can ask ChatGPT to do for microlearning includes:
- Generate questions for tests, quizzes and assessments for your microlearning modules.
- Ask it use learning theories like the ADDIE model while creating content.
- Ask it to generate stories, summaries, emojis etc. for the topics you are working on.
- Ask for script content for your microlearning format like videos, short sims, infographics, podcasts or gamification.
- Ask to write programs and commands in languages like java script, python and so on.
- Ask to simplify complex concepts, make short summaries, create short stories or use cases, and give you the most desirable format outputs like tables, infographics, gamification, interview format, podcast format and so on.
The options are limitless!
The more you experiment and refine it, the better ChatGPT gets in delivering on your expectations.
A word of caution– AI Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can hallucinate- i.e. it can make things up. So, you need to counter that by reviewing for accuracy before the content or information goes into your microlearning platform. You don’t want your learners to go with plausible sounding imaginary numbers, statistics, and sources.
Using ChatGPT AI for Microlearning Content
With this background, we need to follow 3 steps given below:
Explore
Evaluate
- Decide
These 3 filters or steps will help you gain the right perspective in getting the most out of AI generative tools like ChatGPT for your microlearning efforts.
Let’s dig deeper into them…
1. Explore
While exploring ChatGPT, give your microlearning scenarios to it. It gives you a list of ideas to work upon. This gives you a great starting point.
A microlearning lesson requires you to have a microlearning map, the format you want to choose, and then planning to make your desired microlearning asset (production rigor). This requires ideas, content, storyboarding, scripting, questions, assessments and so on.
You can definitely use ChatGPT to help you kick-start. It not only gives ideas for a scenario, but also gives you a list of action–plan specific to you microlearning learning objectives and prompts.
Requested vs Desired Output: the Key is ‘Exploring’
Whether you want to create a gamification module, or a video or a podcast. Ideas come your way easy when you want them.
Having ChatGPT at your fingertips is like having a million brains working to support you. All you need to do is explore and navigate your way through it driven by the clarity of thought and learning objectives for your microlearning lesson.
You must not lose sight of your learning objective, and to explore ChatGPT by being very clear about the scope of your explorative search. Your exploring must align with the learning needs of your workforce. When in doubt, think of your learners, their pain areas, and how to be relevant for them.
ChatGPT Example to Understand ‘Explore’
You are using ChatGPT to generate training content to enhance selling skills of your automobile sales team of a luxury car brand dealer outlets in the USA.
You type in a message in ChatGPT and hit enter-
Message 1
Microlearning training module in less than 800 words for your Pennsylvania car dealerships in USA. Populate it in a tabular format. Topic- Sales closing techniques for newly hired sales team of 10 members working in car dealership showrooms. Team needs to learn top closing techniques to increase sales of high-end luxury cars and exceeding sales targets. [Hit Enter]
Once you hit ‘enter, you get the content in the ‘requested’ format as per your specifications powered by the inbuilt algorithm of the AI engine.
You can continue making subsequent refinements by being more specific, and giving more precise instructions/parameters.
Within the same chat, you continue typing more messages to further drill-down as indicated below. By doing so, you continue getting more and more responses on similar lines.
Message 2
Give examples of each closing technique with a role play. [Hit Enter]
The role play story appears. Now your brain starts thinking and working even more. You realize that this story could be used by you for your video or podcast of your microlearning asset. You may even begin planning on using the story in your second series of microlearning lessons to cater to spaced repetition and retrieval practice attempts. After all, you need to keep revisiting your learners’ brain to eliminate or reduce the forgetting curve proposed by Ebbinghaus.
This way, you continue typing more messages like the one given below.
Message 3
Turn this closing technique into microlearning gamification. [Hit Enter]
The output gives you more ideas about how game should be including the proposed format, description, rewards/achievement parameters and structure.
This way you could further refine the story suggested by ChatGPT for your microlearning gamification contexts and situations with a plethora of win-lose situations.
Message 4
Turn this gamification exercise into a story for microlearning lesson. [Hit Enter]
This gives you a story which can very easily be converted into a microlearning ‘podcast’.
The above example is to trigger you into exploring ChatGPT with an open mind, and to use it sensibly and creatively without losing sight of your learning objectives and expectations.
Questions that you need to ask ChatGPT include things like- defining the context, battling inaccurate information, managing inconsistency of suggestions, and even managing regulatory/security concerns.
So, given your situation exploring gets better each time you link the dots with a ‘sound knowledge of microlearning approach’ and ‘specific learning-objectives’.
The more drilldowns you type, the better it gets.
2. Evaluate
Evaluation matters! This is where you begin thinking parallelly.
While evaluating, you estimate, appraise, evaluate, value, rate, assess and thereby judge information with respect to its worth and significance to your microlearning needs.
The information that comes your way must be used, modified, deleted, and adapted based on your learning needs and intended learning outcomes.
The content or output produced by ChatGPT must be evaluated for relevance, impact and applicability to your specific scenario. What to do with the content or information generated by ChatGPT needs filtering along with finding gaps or missing information.
ChatGPT gives you a great starting point every time you hit enter for an idea or for further refinement or even a detour. So, using your subject matter expertise matters. ChatGPT comes with generally applicable information which should be tempered for your specific requirements.
Remember- ChatGPT is a database AI tool with fixed information fed into it till 2021. ChatGPT or other AI engines need not necessarily have the information specific to you – your markets, your products, your competitors, your external environment, pain points, threats, opportunities, strengths or weaknesses etc.
You need to integrate information based on your own expertise into the output generated to get the best results. This is why by evaluating and filtering the output generated by ChatGPT AI, your microlearning content, format and design will only get better and specific to your needs. Consequently, your training ROI shoots-up when a microlearning module is based on the trends and patterns your learners exhibit.
Role of a Microlearning Platform in Evaluating
A good microlearning platform like MaxLearn with superior analytics capabilities becomes a pre-requisite to evaluate efficiently and sensibly.
This way, the analytics capability of you microlearning platform keeps you guided while evaluating the ‘input’ (prompts, questions, refinements) you give to ChatGPT, as well as the ‘output’ it produces.
In a nutshell, the clarity you get by continually ‘evaluating’ information in the light of your context and realities helps you navigate and get a better grip over your learning strategy. It simply needs to be based on your unique business environment- both internal and external.
3. Decide
This is where you choose! Finally, it comes down to picking, filtering, accepting, or rejecting whatever ChatGPT throws at you as an output.
The final decision-maker is you whether it is an idea, a context, a concept, a storyboard, a format, a command, a story, a script, a bunch of questions, a blueprint of microlearning map or anything else!
ChatGPT will always respond to the inputs prompted by you.
However, all the key decisions are all YOURS to make- be it the microlearning module design/format, learning objective, the frequency of reinforcements/spaced repetitions or retrieval practice, and the entire production rigor.
Here’s an indicative list of decisions you need to make in your microlearning initiative:
- Dealing with the project factors that influence, promote or impede the planning and implementation of your microlearning initiative.
- Deciding on an implementation plan with a proper pre- production, production, and post-production rigor.
- Taking the right decision based on the unforeseen issues, budgetary constraints, stakeholder buy-in, roadblocks, and technology factors including the use of an adaptive microlearning platform.
- Deciding upon maintaining and generating the content, coordinating with subject matter experts and the technical team (including instructional designers, developers, and other technical/non-technical staff).
- Knowing and deciding upon the kind of microlearning analytics you need. Plus, how all these factors help you enhance individual on-the-job performance and mastery on the subject.
- Deciding upon various design and development variables like expertise of your team on instructional design pre-requisites, project-management skills, level of interactivity of your microlearning module, and many other environmental factors.
- Now, this is just a short list of activities based on which you take decisions. Clearly, not everything you do at work can be delivered using AI LLMs like ChatGPT.
MaxLearn: A Robust and Enabling Microlearning Platform
You need a superior microlearning platform like MaxLearn to eventually give life to your microlearning lesson.
Integrating ChatGPT AI with a microlearning platform like MaxLearn can be done using an API. The underlying logic is to use ‘embeddings’ to give your microlearning platform a ‘long term memory’ on the kind of content you normally seek. This way, you can teach ChatGPT on ‘how to respond’ to certain prompts in tune with what you are looking for. It’s like training AI to do a better job in meeting your expectations.
The good news is that the MaxLearn platform is extremely feature-rich. It comes powered with an AI-powered Content Assist called AI Author that enables you to create content instantaneously without wasting long hours on developing content for a microlearning snippet.
While creating MaxLearn platform, the focus has been to offset the pain areas, fears and apprehensions of the training manager. Not only can you quickly develop a microlearning lesson and churn out lessons rapidly, but also seamlessly edit and upload them on the platform instantaneously.
The AI Author module of MaxLearn comes loaded with several user-friendly features.
It includes:
- A scientifically designed and user-friendly interface provided in MaxLearn to generate content using ChatGPT
- Instantaneous uploading of the generated content in a scientifically structured format consisting of Category, Subject and Topic, Decks of Flash Cards, Key Learning Points and Questions aligned to the KLPs.
- Generation of questions using Bloom’s Taxonomy to facilitate adaptive learning
- Instantaneous generation of multiple KLPs, Flash Cards and different variants of questions in one go
- Inbuilt editing facility for Subject Matter Experts
- MaxLearn’s Active feedback feature to improve and continually evolve the content.
MaxLearn gives you a platform that has real time monitoring capability along with cutting-edge analytics capabilities. You get detailed analysis focused on the competency areas of your workforce on an on-going basis!
Three outcomes that are a given with MaxLearn microlearning platform:
A. Fast
It means adding rapid development, minutes-a-session and quick-to-market capabilities to your training armoury. You can hit the ground running. This makes you quick, agile and efficient.
B. Fun
MaxLearn offers a fun and engaging way of learning by recognising learners’ performance and invoking team spirit to keep them motivated.
C. Effective
Cutting edge AI technology, data analytics, personalised learning strategies, micro-targeting of learners, a Goal-based Learning Model and other proven learning principles and deep knowledge of neuroscience to makes MaxLearn truly powerful and super effective!
Qualitative idea generation as well as content creation for microlearning modules can be done using ChatGPT and MaxLearn’s AI Content Assistant namely AI Author. But that is possible only when you explore, evaluate and decide right.
Together, MaxLearn and ChatGPT AI create unparalleled synergies for your microlearning initiatives. All you need to do is to use ChatGPT to work for you like an AI assistant guided by your prompts. Thereafter, you can easily launch the content with the right design and format using MaxLearn’s microlearning platform.
To conclude, a sound L&D expertise, willingness to use AI with an open mind, a clear understanding of microlearning, and a robust platform like MaxLearn gets you closer to achieving an enviable training ROI.
