A tailored skills development programme for individual seafarers can maximise effectiveness
By Felicity Landon
We are constantly told that thanks to social media, 24-hour news and an apparent collective reluctance to learn about any topic ‘in depth’, attention spans are shrinking, particularly among the younger generations. And yet binge-watching of Netflix series is commonplace – no problem with attention spans there – and, somehow, we still have highly trained, knowledgeable and competent people emerging from training and entering the workforce.
Is this more about being time poor rather than attention poor? Yes, partly – but that doesn’t mean microlearning does away with the hard graft and in-depth training required to become a competent and safe seafarer. Microlearning is best suited for ongoing training, whether tailored to individual or fleetwide requirements, designed as refresher or reminder type learning, or focusing on new technologies, risks or safety issues.
Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered his ‘Forgetting Curve’ back in 1885, so the concept of ongoing learning is hardly new. Learning and development strategist Paul Matthews, CEO of People Alchemy, says: “The trainees on your programme will steadily forget most of the information they were exposed to on the training course unless you add components into your programme designed to counter the effects of the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. And by programme, I don’t just mean the training event – I mean what is designed to happen after the training event.” The only way to ‘beat’ Ebbinghaus is to extend your thinking beyond the classroom, Matthews insists.
Captain Pradeep Chawla, CEO of maritime learning solutions specialist MarinePALS, says human beings are better suited to learn in short bites: “We lose attention fairly quickly and with all the social media bombarding our sensibilities, tend to be very focused for a short time on one topic.”
If you attended a two-hour lecture at college, how much of it would you really remember 30 days later? While MarinePALS is all about digital training, Chawla is quick to emphasise that classroom teaching and simulator teaching will remain; most of what his company does is post-STCW. “The focus of our platform is on day-today operations of the ship to prevent accidents, injuries and Port State Control deficiencies,” he says. “We also cover topics such as sexual harassment, mental health, etc.”
Seven-minute span
MarinePALS conducted extensive testing with seafarers and concluded that up to seven minutes is about right for keeping the trainee’s attention. “Some topics can’t be covered in five minutes or even seven minutes. In these cases, we follow the ‘Netflix model’ and make it episode one and episode two and hope people will follow on immediately. We typically have two formats – seven minutes for short bite-size learning and one minute for reminders.”
Look at how e-learning has evolved, notes Chawla – it started with the teacher recording what they were doing in the classroom so people could catch up later. “We don’t have any formats where it is just a narrator talking about something. If you see only a narrator on the screen, it gets boring – but if you have a proper video with music and action, it is like watching a movie and you tend to remain focused. All our videos are made with seafarers, and we also aim for diversity so that people can identify themselves sub-consciously.”
MarinePALS training is based on three ‘pillars’ – videos, gamification of learning and VR training; and three types of courses – assigned courses, learning pathways with mandatory training modules, and self-learning. A crewing department can monitor training uptake – identifying if a person is doing the required training promptly (or needs reminders) and guiding seafarers to particular videos if there is a perceived weakness in an area. “With the availability of analytics, we can modify a programme – the idea is to change the student’s behaviour to be a constant learner,” says Chawla. “We can also respond quickly. If, for example, there is an incident we can make a video enabling seafarers to understand the mistakes their colleagues made and/or where they took the right steps.”
Multi-channel
The Nautical Institute produces magazines, videos and other material to help people keep up with the pace of change and share ideas about best practice: “We believe in through-life learning,” says head of projects Captain David Patraiko. “We don’t necessarily use the term ‘microlearning’ – we just try to figure out what works best. However, most of our members are practitioners, both at sea and ashore; they do like brevity and, being mariners, have probably been very used to precise communication. So, if we have a message, we try to keep it short and to the point.”
As a partner of the OCEAN project, last year the Nautical Institute developed seven maritime training videos covering topics such as leadership, maritime situational awareness, effective communication and avoiding ship whale strikes. These can be downloaded free and used without any restrictions – and have been well received, says Katerina Sfaellou, senior communications officer at the Nautical Institute. “They can be used as discussion openers, in short meetings and in webinars, and as a learning tool for further discussion at sea,” she says.
The Institute runs the Mariners’ Alerting and Reporting Scheme (MARS), which enables the confidential reporting of accidents and near misses. “MARS is an interesting approach to microlearning because it taps into different elements,” says Sfaellou. “The platform enables people to provide the information confidentially and it automatically becomes a microlearning experience, tapping into mentoring, soft skills, leadership and CPD.”
Patraiko says the Institute uses the term ‘blended learning’: “Yes, the underpinning knowledge is very important. You need to know your maths to navigate, and your engineering to run the ship. But then there are all sorts of other topics and the need to top up people’s knowledge.”
He is keen on short manufacturers’ videos which can instantly assist a seafarer carrying out maintenance on board: “When you need to dismantle a pump, with just-in-time learning you know exactly what tools you need and what to do.”
However, he believes digital learning has its limitations; the Institute prints The Navigator. “Printing 100,000 copies is not cheap and people often say ‘have you heard of digital publishing?’ However, a lot of research has shown that if information is on paper, you have a higher retention – people tend to scan digital material and are easily distracted.”
A disservice to seafarers
Raal Harris, chief creative officer of Ocean Technologies Group, challenges the idea about short attention spans: “In this industry, we ask people to stand on watch for hours on end. If they can’t concentrate and have no attention span, they are going to get into trouble. So we need to give our people credit that they are unique and are able to give their attention to the task.”
He sees microlearning as part of a necessary shift, where people are continually learning, taking control of their own learning and understanding how to find and use the resources they need.
“Microlearning is about making use of small windows of time to create learning events – and what’s driving that is mobile adoption,” he says. “In the old days, the crew would be brought together in the mess room to watch a video together and talk about the themes and topics. Think about the logistics of that; for a five-minute video, it would take longer to get all the people together than to watch the video.”
Microlearning comes into its own thanks to platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, he says – if a seafarer comes across a specific issue, they can look for a learning resource that will help. “It’s also about repetition and reinforcement – you might do a longer piece of learning but over time that’s dropping out of your memory, but a microlearning event – a little refresher – allows you to remember what you did before and reinforce that learning. Studies show that the more you do that, the more it falls into the long-term memory.
“The idea that you can cover the thing you used to do in 45 minutes in five minutes is palpably nonsense,” he says. “There are big pieces of learning you need to understand and long curriculums, but breaking them down into the smallest, most divisible parts – a series of microlearning units – allows you the flexibility to consume it in different ways.”
This approach also enables the creation of personalised training pathways for seafarers, taking into account areas where an individual doesn’t feel confident or needs reinforcement. “The pace of change in the industry means that everybody needs to be continually ready to learn and continually thinking about development of their skills.”
Quality counts
Harris emphasises the need to be creative to get learning to stick – sometimes that’s difficult if you are limited to three or five minutes. “We must not get seduced by the idea that short is always virtuous. If it doesn’t deliver and have impact, then it’s a waste of two minutes. If something’s rubbish for two minutes, it’s still rubbish.
“People don’t have any problem binge-watching Netflix. Films are getting longer. People spend hours playing computer games. Maritime is a serious business and we are operating in high-risk situations. Some of what we have to impart is extremely complicated and it’s really important that people do concentrate.”
Chawla adds that building a learning culture in a company is probably the most important task that the people in the office have. “It has never been so difficult for a seafarer as it is today because there is so much change coming – new fuels, automation, digitalisation, AI. The seafarer has to be encouraged to learn continuously.”
“There are big pieces of learning you need to understand and long curriculums, but breaking them down into the smallest, most divisible parts – a series of microlearning units – allows you the flexibility to consume it in different ways”
