What Can TikTok Teach Us About Learning Design?

In May 2020, TikTok set its sights on education by introducing its #LearnOnTikTok initiative. Specifically launched in response to pandemic lockdowns, this initiative saw TikTok invest $50 million in a Creative Learning Fund for educational content. Under this fund, 800 household names, media publishers, educational institutions, and real-world professional experts came together to generate educational content for TikTok users.

Since then, #LearnOnTikTok has garnered over 416 billion views, and education has become an intentional focus area for TikTok. The platform’s success in learning content makes sense: GenZ are hungry for learning—a hunger that increased during the pandemic—and they have long preferred learning via video platforms like YouTube over more traditional mediums.

What can we learn from TikTok’s effectiveness as a learning platform? How might you apply these learnings to your own content?  Let’s break it down:

#DesignForPlay

TikTok is, by design, playful. It’s less formal and less manicured than platforms like Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. After all, it started as a dance app before evolving into what we know it to be today. This creates a playfulness in much of its learning content—whether generated by professional subject matter experts or average users—that makes learning fun.

Play is a valuable building block for high impact learning. When we are playing, we are not thinking about getting things wrong, or looking bad. We are immersed in the moment. We are experimenting. We are open. Play is a hack that can create a safe space for failure.

How can you apply this?

Infuse play and fun into your learning and development content by designing for purposeful play. Use play as a tool to create a rich environment for learning. This is not about tossing a ball around, getting some laughs, and calling it a day. It’s about being intentional in designing playfulness into your learning experiences. Doing this is both an art and a science. Elements of teamwork, constructive competition, multisensory immersion, red threads, etc. can strategically amplify purposeful play in your learning sessions and content.

#KeepItSimple

How much can you say in 30 seconds? That’s the average length of a TikTok video. Until July 2021, a TikTok video could only be up to 60 seconds long. Until February of this year, it could only be up to 3 minutes in length.

These time constraints really force content creators to keep it simple and focused. From the straightforward to the complex, the mundane to the remarkable, banana bread to the cretaceous period. Done well, TikTok shows that any learning can be made short, sharp, and simple, and still be high value and engaging. Currently, in our exhausting hybrid working world, adopting this focus and simplicity can go a long way in keeping your audience’s attention and engagement.

How can you apply this?

Distil everything down to your core learning content by thinking in one’s and three’s. First, identify the one single thing you want your audience to learn, in 5-6 words. Then, identify the three things you need them to understand, or do, or apply, or take away, to learn that one single thing. Finally, focus everything on that one and those three. Applied well, even a 24-month programme can be the epitome of simplicity.

#MakeItEasy

TikTok is great for learning because its sophisticated algorithm constantly shows fresh content that is deemed relevant for you based on your interests and past interactions. The average length of a video is 21 to 34 seconds, so it doesn’t require a large investment of your time to view one or two or ten. This massive library of content is easily available on any smartphone, so it can be viewed anywhere with internet.

Put together, we have learning that requires very little cognitive effort to find, minimal time to watch, and few resources to access. It’s easy.

How can you apply this?

Make learning in your organisation easy by minimising the before- and after-learning effort. A simple principle in UI design is minimising clicks. It’s in fact called the 3-click rule: a user should be able to perform a task within 3 clicks. That is good UI design: it’s about reducing the brainpower required to do something.

When it comes to learning in your organisation, how many steps do your people have to go through to access content, or attend a session, or engage with material? This could include steps needed to understand what content is available, search for it, find it, access it, etc. How much brainpower is someone using before they really need it to learn the content itself? The answer should be: as little as possible.

Looking to further harness the power of social media to maximise the impact of your learning materials? Our multi-award-winning partnership with bp saw their campus attraction programme transformed into a pioneering skills-based attraction initiative, with a social media reach of over 1.3 million graduates.

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