e-Learning Leadership Blog

Who Cares About e-Learning for Compliance Training?

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by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist

Each time I teach the ASTD e-Learning Design Certificate courses, I’m reminded of how many organizations look to e-Learning as the vehicle for delivering compliance training — training that for legal or regulatory reasons the organization is required to conduct and document.  Compliance training often is related to certification or accreditation, and failure to comply may result in hefty monetary fines or restrictions to even operate.

It seems that organizations rush to use e-Learning in these situations for two major reasons:  the burden of teaching this bureaucratic information consistently through other means is too onerous, and the reporting of completion data through an LMS greatly simplifies the effort to document compliance.

Unfortunately, there are two common attributes of the resulting e-Learning that virtually guarantee failure: company-wide acceptance that compliance content is by definition “boring” excuses the worst sort of useless page-turning as the instructional model for the learning modules, and the “check-box” reporting mentality creates simplistic and meaningless interactivity that begs to be ignored by the learners.  (And this check-box mentality is coming back to haunt organization as many overseeing entities have realized the meaningless nature of this kind of reporting and have begun to validate training through site visits and more challenging qualitative evaluation methods.)

This is a good example of how positive motivators for one group can be at best neutral or even de-motivating for others. While one hopes that individual businesses value the positive impact on the individual worker of these training topics (like sexual harassment, workplace diversity, or even something as practical as emergency preparedness), the primary motivation for the organization to comply with these training requirements is a matter of administrative duty.  They have no choice if they want to continue operating.  

This administrative duty does not really transfer with the same impact to individual employees, yet I am amazed at how often the sole “welcoming” message to the learner that opens a compliance training piece is essentially, “The only reason we’re making you do this is because we have to.”  This message is reinforced when the learner gets into the “training” and is subject to the tedious and inane page turning and trivia activities that result from this sort of design approach.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  As twisted and misguided as some of these regulations have become in their official implementation, there is usually a valuable idea at the core.  Workplaces really do function better when there is a shared respect for diversity; no worker wants to be the victim of sexual harassment, and it is in everyone’s interest to be able to proceed safely in various emergencies.  

These topics touch each learner in very personal ways, and any training that is going to be successful is going to have to tap into how each employee is responsible for the work climate.  The motivators that are going to engage the learner by necessity will have to address attitudes, personal consequences, and elicit specific memories of past experiences that can be tied to the objectives.  This will not happen unless the designer of the instruction creates interactivity that will lead the learner in that direction.

Creating bad e-Learning is just as expensive as creating good e-Learning. Actually it’s probably more expensive when you take into consideration the wasted training time and the ill-will and distrust that it builds while not teaching.  Just because we think of the course as required teaching doesn’t mean that learners process it as required learning.  The necessity for creating meaning and relevance is probably even greater than for the other training projects we face.

In Designing e-Learning Motivation Makes all the Difference

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by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist

This July 4^th holiday weekend gave me another reminder about the unique importance of personal motivation in performance environments.  As regular readers of this blog have figured out, in addition to my jet-setting life as designer of e-learning, I ‘m also operating a family organic produce farm in Southern Illinois.  Out of a combination of tradition, choice, and stupidity we continue to operate using largely non-mechanized methods; so naturally the holiday weekend was spent almost entirely working by hand in the dirt in blazing-hot temperatures. My 87-year-old parents toiled away in spite of pain and infirmity, motivated by sense of tradition and values unique to them.  Meanwhile, my lovely visiting nieces and nephews made spotty efforts at helping but didn’t stick with anything more than a few minutes.  The challenge and discomfort was greater than their motivation to help could overcome, in spite of their sincere good intentions to be of use.

Now I don’t want this to sound like an “In the good old days people knew how to work” argument because I don’t believe that at all.  It really was so much an issue of personal motivation.  No amount of pleading to rest for the holiday or to cut off because of the heat could lessen my parents’ motivation to plant, to weed, to care for the vegetables, in spite of all the environmental factors working against that.  Similarly, no amount of nudging, lecturing, modeling, or even royal edict could motivate the kids to do much.  What was deeply personal to one group was irrelevant and pointless to another.

This is exactly the problem we face so often as designers of e-learning.  Our subject matter experts or project owners live and breathe the content we are to teach. And they expect that the same values that have given significance to the content for them over many years can be directly transferred to the learners.  Unfortunately, that’s impossible.  To get learners engaged in understanding new content and performing new skills, we as designers need to tie the content to some motivation existing in the learner, or to manufacture an urgency (using game design, networking, or simulation aspects) that the learners buy into.  This is important in all learning, but particularly so in e-learning where learners are, for the most part, working entirely on their own.

So equal to the task of analyzing content and designing instruction is the challenge of understanding our learners and designing interactivity that will provide personal motivation.  And if you have to err on one side or another—creating perfectly crafted content or building motivating instructional interactions-- I’d err on the side of creating the compelling interactivity.  With the right motivation, learners will figure out ways to make meaning out of even poorly designed content.  But there’s no way to impose motivation on the most beautifully structured content without considerable planning and insight. 

Here are some ideas for designing for motivation:

• Ensure learners are aware of meaningful consequences
• Develop a sense of risk
• Ensure the learner benefits from adaptive content and branching
• Draw the learner in by expert storytelling and creation of suspense
• Appreciate the aesthetic appeal of graphics and media
• Engage in meta-thinking with questions whose importance is elevated through multiple-step tasks and delayed judgment

Taking the time to really understand one’s audience and what motivates them will reward the designer many times over in engagement and active metal processing that results from powerfully-designed and relevant training tasks.