How I would approach creating compliance e-learning

Last week I reported on Towards Maturity's latest study, Reinvigorating Compliance Training. The study showed clearly what a hole we have got ourselves into with e-learning compliance training. More often than not management is coming to us with a requirement for a simple tell-and-test programme that does little more than tick boxes, and it seems that we are only too keen to oblige. In the process we risk irreparable damage to our status as professional designers and perpetuate management's perception that we are mere order takers.

It's easy to criticise, much harder to put forward a solution. However, I like a challenge, so, it falls to me to put my reputation on the line by suggesting how I would approach a request for compliance e-learning. I'm going to assume that I've already explored the alternatives and that e-learning stands a reasonable chance of influencing the outcome. So what would I do?

Analysing the requirement

FIrst of all, I need answers to some important questions:

• What do we want employees to do that they may not be doing now, if the organisation is to achieve its goals for compliance?
• What must (note the emphasis) employees know if they are to do these things?
• What big ideas/principles do they need to understand and buy into in order to do these things?
• What skills, if any, do they need to acquire and/or put into practice in order to do these things?
• Over and above knowledge and skills, what else needs to be in place in the work environment if performance is going to change?

A typical solution

The answers to the questions above will obviously determine the shape of the solution. However, more often than not I would expect to see many of the following elements in the solution:

• A resource, probably a video, which ramps up the level of emotional engagement. Using a documentary approach, I would interview real people who have been in real situations of risk related to the area of compliance. Statistics are not enough - we are much more likely to engage with the stories of real people. The important principle to get across here is that non-compliance really matters - it could threaten your employer's future and your own.
• A diagnostic assessment which determines how much of the programme you need to take - none, some or all. This assessment would comprise of a series of mini-scenarios (the portrayal of a situation, followed by one or more 'what would you do?' questions) rather than a knowledge test.
• For novices, a clear and concise exposition of the absolute essentials of the policy, backed up with examples and rationales. Probably best if this is easily accessible and printable, so not a piece of e-learning.
• A series of more in-depth scenarios tackling ever more challenging but realistic situations, ideally directly relevant to your particular job role. An element of gamification here might add something.
• Resources which support the scenarios with in-depth explanations. These can take the form of web articles, videos, PDFs or whatever is necessary. The idea is that you will go to these to fill any gaps in your knowledge brought out by the scenarios.
• A final assessment, again based on mini-scenarios, and ideally drawn from a large pool to reduce the risk of cheating. To avoid users guessing, I'd include the option 'I don't know' in every question. This would score zero points, whereas wrong answers would score minus points, making a guess a risky response.
• To follow-up, I'd provide a forum where you could ask experts for answers to really tricky questions not covered in the programme.
• I'd also keep up a steady flow of new stories and reminders by email, on the intranet or any social platform.
• And I'd try and make sure that compliance was not only modelled by managers but backed up by the performance management system.

So, what would you do?

Compliance - e-learning's greatest friend and worst enemy

Towards Maturity has just published a study called Reinvigorating Compliance Training. Bringing it back from the dead might be more apt.

Here are some of the findings, based on responses from 136 organisations representing 2.3m employees across 17 countries:

• 98% of organisations want technology-enabled compliance training to help manage risk more successfully.
• 12% of organisations say compliance training is helping achieve their business goal of changing working culture.
• 23% of businesses are raising awareness and understanding of complex regulations with compliance training.
• 67% of organisations say user engagement is the top barrier to adopting technology enabled compliance training.
• 20% of organisations include opportunities for staff to practice.
• 20% of organisations provide managers with resources and job aids to encourage application back in the workplace.

It looks to me like a whole load of organisations are experiencing a very poor return on their expectations.

In the Foreword to the report, Iain McLeod of SAI Global Compliance, which sponsored the study, had this to say:

Universally, lack of employee engagement emerged as the biggest barrier to effectiveness � and is linked strongly to the poor reputation of compliance e-learning. Ask yourself what efforts you are currently making to really engage your audience and make it relevant to them. If you are subjecting your employees to �death by PowerPoint�, rolling out the same content year after year to everyone regardless of their job role or risk profile, blinding the learner with irrelevant detail about what the law says rather than what it means to them or failing to engage your line managers in the process, then the chances are you are potentially turning off the very people whose buy-in you need to effectively mitigate your compliance risks.

I have had the misfortune to experience some dreadful compliance e-learning, constituting the worst form of 'tell and test'. I have also seen some wonderful efforts. It is possible to do this job properly, to satisfy the needs of regulators while also providing a stimulating and thought-provoking experience that has a good chance of changing behaviour. But clearly we are not doing this often enough.

E-learning producers are in a difficult position, because a great deal of their work comes in the form of compliance training (according to Charles Jennings, 80% of all e-learning produced in Australia is to meet compliance needs). But in the long run they must surely feel the effects of a poor user experience:

1. Employees hate doing compliance training
2. As a result, trainers hate training it
3. The answer, then, is to use e-learning instead
4. With the result that now learners hate e-learning

Sorting out this problem may, in the end, determine whether formal, self-study e-learning continues to exist. In the next week I'll present my vision of what a compliance course could look like.

Should webinars be recorded?

In their book Wired for Speech, Clifford Nass and Scott Brave make an interesting point:

'Recording can have an enormous psychological impact on people. When people have a sense of being recorded, they are likely to say different things and process what is said differently than when they believe they are not being recorded. The lack of a record allows people to speak with a sense of informality and plausible deniability. Conversely, consider how much more careful, self-conscious and guarded people are when speaking "on the record" as opposed to "off the record".'

While the purpose of Nass and Brave's book was to describe their research on voice interfaces for electronic devices such as satellite navigation systems, there are implications in the context of learning technologies. The first and most obvious is whether we should be recording webinars. By doing so, are we unnecessarily impeding the natural flow of conversation? Do participants become inhibited by the fact that some unknown others might listen in to the recording some time in the future? Quite possibly.

This presents us with a difficulty because the ability to make recordings for the benefit of those unable to be present at the time represents a real advantage for webinars over the physical classroom. If we want the same easy flow of communication that can be obtained face-to-face when we're online, then we have to consider not pressing the record button. We have to rule out recording surreptitiously because this would be unethical and possibly illegal, but we may be able to achieve a happy compromise by limiting access to the recording to fellow students.

There is another implication of this reluctance to be recorded which might explain why it can be so difficult to get employees to contribute to forums and other types of social media in the workplace. Contributing a post, even just a comment, is like being recorded. Your words are captured digitally and stored for years to come for all sorts of third parties - real and imagined - to retrieve, read and interpret, favourably or otherwise. Many employees will ask whether this is worth the risk? Those of us who have poured out our souls to social media over many years with little in the way of negative consequences will believe they are over-estimating the danger, but we're not them, are we?

Why statistics are not enough

It would be easy if all you had to do to teach an important general principle was to describe it. You know:

• An organisation with a rich diversity of employees will be more effective in addressing the diverse needs of its customers.
• Young drivers are more at risk of being involved in a major automobile accident.
• E-learning is twice as quick as the equivalent classroom training.

Presenting people with statistical information and descriptions of scientific studies will only get you so far. Your students may be able to recite a statistic in an exam and even regurgitate the 'official interpretation', but that doesn't mean they really believe it, not deep down, at least as far as it applies to them.

Psychologists Richard Nisbett and Eugene Borgia conducted a number of studies with their students at the University of Michigan back in 1975 which led them to the conclusion that psychology was very hard, if not possible to teach. Although their students became more knowledgeable about the genetal principles of psychology, they showed little evidence of application of these principles to particular cases. However, when confronted with real, human examples of surprising behaviour (especially their own), they were quick to generalise these to the population at large. Their conclusion:

'Subjects unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.'

This statement, quoted in Daniel Kahneman's excellent Thinking Fast and Slow (Penguin, 2011), struck me like a bullet. Of course, this is why guided discovery works so well when the objective is to improve problem-solving and decision-making skills, and why the exposition of theory is so frustratingly ineffective.

If you really need to 'sell' an idea, go for case studies, scenarios, simulations, practical assignments, backed up by coaching and facilitated discussion. Forget the slides full of theory and the tests that these have been remembered - or at least hold them back until the insight has been obtained through personal experience.

As Kahneman explains:

'You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behaviour than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.'

Which means, of course, that this post will be of little more than passing relevance unless or until you can relate this to your own experience. But I couldn't resist trying one more time.