Posted on August 29, 2006 4:21 AM by
Shanti Atkins
Now that’s a lose-lose situation. An employer invests significant dollars in online compliance training, employees actually complete the program, but the ability of learners to subvert the entire process invalidates approximately 10% of the compliance records. Almost 6,000 of them. Ouch.
This is the problem that can arise with “check the box” style training that does not truly engage a learner, or require them to consistently interact with the training materials. It illustrates why not all e-learning is created equal.
A well-designed ethics course, both in terms of content and instructional design, would not allow a learner to breeze through in just minutes. Think of the message a 10-minute program sends to employees about the organization’s true commitment to compliance. Think of how easy it would be to attack that training in a legal or administrative proceeding should the program ever need to be used defensively.
This is just another area where best practices for ethics training and harassment training intersect. There’s a reason why California has created stringent requirements for the state’s mandatory harassment training law, AB 1825. It’s to avoid debacles like the one in Illinois. The AB 1825 regs require that harassment training be highly interactive, and that it be completed in no less than two hours. (AB 1825 regulation details)
The Illinois situation highlights some other important considerations when it comes to designing or selecting compliance programs.
- What purpose does a scored quiz serve? At the State of Illinois, the 6,000 employees with now invalid training records passed the course’s quiz. Obviously, the test was not vigorous enough to allay concerns, which suggests it was watered down and far too easy.
This highlights a big problem with testing: If you design a test that will challenge senior leaders and sophisticated learners, you will get large failure rates when the quiz is taken by everyone in the organization. What do you do with the learners who don’t pass? How do you ensure remedial efforts with all of them?
If you make the quiz simple enough for entry-level employees to pass, the quiz may become so basic that it serves no purpose and is not taken seriously.
The better answer: create different course versions for different audience segments. Then use challenging, interactive questions (appropriate for the employee level) to reinforce key learning concepts. Learners should not be able to proceed until questions are answered correctly, but you should leave scored quizzes out of your programs.
-
How are you positioning the training within your organization? Your learners should understand that the training is important to the organization and a part of their job function. Here, that message was apparently lost. Employees complained that the training took them away from the jobs – reflecting a “get this over with and get back to work” mentality. Further, the course design left learners with the impression that all they needed to do was pass the quiz.
Here’s the bottom line – online ethics and compliance courses should help solve training challenges – not create them. Employers are coming under increasing scrutiny regarding the effectiveness of their training programs, both internally and externally.
Demand high quality.
Tags:
Ethics Training & Compliance Training,