Last week I had the privilege of judging the e-learning awards (obviously my lips are sealed as to who the winners are until the awards dinner). Naturally some of the entries had other ingredients that made them sparkle in other ways, but here I can share five themes that many of the short-listed entries had in common. These should be useful to both clients and vendors who are looking to make their compliance e-learning more interesting and impactful.
1. Focus on behaviours not policies
If the organisation requires people to read the whole policy, e-learning should not be the answer – put in place an effective system of tracking completion and the right carrots and sticks. What e-learning should be used for is providing realistic ways for learners to practice the desired behaviours and providing the minimum viable knowledge to do this. If you get the attitudes right, people will refer to the policy when they need to.
Several entries successfully boiled the underpinning policies down to just a few key messages which could then be communicated in engaging ways. This may take significant trust from your subject matter experts, but this is increasingly the direction of travel that regulators are taking (away from ‘tick box’ compliance).
2. Make the learning part of a campaign
Once you have defined the key messages about how you want people to behave, think about it as a communications campaign. E-learning is just one channel within the overall campaign. There has been much already written on this, so I won’t dwell on the benefits of campaign thinking and spaced practice e.g. improved memory, social learning, buzz, ease of learning transfer back into the workplace. Some entries applied campaign thinking very effectively.
3. Pre-test
Life is too short to be told things you already know so that your employer is legally protected. It’s a far better use of everyone’s time if learners have a pre-test. This means that the people who need the learning get it and those who don’t don’t (pre-testing enables a variety of routes through the learning). To make this viable, the questions in the pre-test need to be challenging and really robust. The amount of learner time that you’ll save more than justifies paying for additional instructional design expertise if you need help to step up the quality of questioning.
4. Use role filters
Learners don’t want to feel that they are being sheep-dipped. For large multi-role learner populations it is worth segmenting by role so that learners get their own learning paths, scenarios with more face validity and questions that more closely match the context into which they are going to demonstrate the target behaviours.
5. Tone of voice
Too much compliance e-learning has historically had a parent ð child tone (“sit down and take your medicine, this will hurt me more than it hurts you…”). A more adult ð adult tone was strongly in evidence and it was refreshing to see examples where humour had been used without detracting from the seriousness of the key messages being communicated.
I trust you find these themes helpful and do contact me if you have a compliance need that could use some extra stardust.