How do you get to Carnegie Hall? the old joke asks.

But how do you improve the effectiveness of workplace learning? Repetition, repetition, repetition – especially spaced repetition.

And mobile learning offers a great way to leverage the learning benefits of spaced repetition.

Spaced repetition is an instructional technique that been the focus of a great deal of research, but so far very little it has made limited in-roads into the world of workplace learning. Which is too bad, because it can be a great tool for increasing long-term retention and, as a result, improving job performance.

Will Thalheimer of Work Learning Research has put together a great overview of the research findings around spaced repetition, and he offers his report, Spacing Learning Over Time, free from his website. 

Spaced repetition is pretty much exactly what it sounds like – repeating instruction on a topic over a period of time.

The repetition can take many forms. It can be a verbatim repeat, or a modification/re-presentation. It can also include stories or other ways of adding context to the learning, practice exercises, tests, and even discussion groups – pretty much all the instructional tools in the toolbox, so to speak.

The key is the spacing. It appears that repeating the learning experience immediately actually only helps move information into short-term memory – that’s what happens when we cram for exams, Thalheimer points out. We can retain the crammed information long enough to be able to write the exam, but we don’ retain it much past that. And the goal of work-related learning is to promote on the job performance improvement, which requires moving learning into long-term memory to have a lasting effect.

And this is where mobile learning offer some really good opportunities, especially for the repetitions.

Let’s say your learners take a product training course as part of their onboarding week in a new sales role. That course could be any format – instructor led or self-paced elearning, for example. Now, they have lots of other training during that same week of onboarding – like all the usual policy courses, etc. – not too mention all of the other associated orientation processes, so how can you reasonably expect them to retain the product knowledge that is key to their on-the-job performance after a week of new learning? Well, you can’t. But here’s where spaced repetition can help.

Once they begin to actually be on the job, plan a series of short follow up learning opportunities to support that original product training course. The key here is short – now that they are on the job, you don’t want to pull them off again for more training.  And a mobile device, especially a smartphone, is a great way to deliver this.

Structure the learning opportunities as practical exercises that reflect the on-the-job context, like say a short interview exercise where they listen to audio clips to simulate a conversation with a potential client. You can also include job aids that relate top product information, like PDFs of product details, for instance. Then, add in an assessment that focuses on application of their product knowledge to the specific needs the client expressed in the audio clips.

The whole learning opportunity might take five or 10 minutes, tops. Since the learner completed it on their smartphone, they didn’t have to leave the job to complete the learning.

Plan this to happen several times over their first few weeks, and you can really take advantage of the spaced repetition effect. The result should be better transfer of learning to n-the-job performance – and that’s what it’s really all out, isn’t it?

(Our great thanks to Dr. Will Thalheimer for making his invaluable report, Spacing Learning Over Time, available for free from the Work Learning Research web site. Make sure you check out the site, and subscribe to Will’s blog, Will at Work Learning, as well.)

Allow us to brag for a moment, and instead of offering a Tip to use this space to tell you that last week Claro (our e-learning and mlearning authoring platform) was awarded a Gold medal in the Best Advance in Content Authoring and/or Content Management category of the 2011 Brandon Hall Excellence in Technology Awards.

We’re pretty proud!

(And we're always happy to talk about Claro - so don't hesitate to contact us if you want to learn more!)

Will Thalheimer shares his work-learning related thoughts and ideas on his blog, Will at Work Learning.

Thalheimer is very focused on what research has shown actually works in support of the learning process (and he especially likes to burst commonly-held myths, as well).

With all the buzz recently around gamification, anyone in the elearning space should check out GamaSutra.

The site describes itself as all about “The Art and Business of Making Games”, and it’s a great place to get a glimpse into that world.

Even if you don’t add a score counter to your next elearning project, you’ll still find lots of potential ideas and inspiration.