We won this project to develop an e-learning program and assessment for all staff employed by the Skills Funding Agency and the Young People’s Learning Academy. The program needed to cover equality and diversity; particularly with reference to the new Equality Act. As the training is mandatory and linked to performance assessments, we also needed to provide and manage a tracking mechanism.
A major challenge with any legislation based training lies in engaging the learner. Compliance courses can be met with negativity from learners because they may feel they already know the content, or simply just don’t see the value. To ensure engagement, Walkgrove developed a story telling approach reflecting scenarios taken from actual experiences within the organisation. True stories have resonance. They need to be carefully crafted and they also need to be challenging and impartial in terms of objectively putting both sides of the story. Photo stories done badly can patronise and offend. It is an approach which only works when written by skilled instructional designers who can empathise with the client’s culture and values and those of the staff they employ.
The course content included a number of questions with feedback to act as reinforcement and support around the key learning points. We also developed an end of course summative assessment to prove that learners had absorbed and could apply the learning, thus ensuring compliance. The assessment questions are randomised from a bank of questions to ensure learners could not inadvertently pass answers to colleagues and undermine the process. The balance of questioning for this kind of material can be tricky; questions need to challenge, but not confuse the learner in order to provide effective validation. Conversely, it is easy for the inexperienced designer to design assessments which are little more than an exercise in applying common sense. Feedback tells us we have got the balance right. Learners have commented on the need to reflect on the course content before they answer, but a pass rate of over 93% demonstrates that the training itself has achieved its objective.
Many of the organisations we have worked with have needed to look for tracking systems outside their own in-house LMS. There are a number of reasons that make using an internal LMS for compliance courses impractical; financial, technical, or the sheer logistics of rolling out a course to a large body of people in a short time period. In this case the speed of deployment led the client to ask Walkgrove to develop a simple, bespoke tracking tool that reported on attendance, completion, and scores. Walkgrove also provide a managed service to provide monthly reports which take account of joiners, leavers and transferees.
To complicate the project further we had to meet tight deadlines. The project was deployed eight weeks after we were commissioned. Eight weeks after implementation over eighty percent of the organisation had gone through the training with a pass rate of over 93%.
