Why ‘off the shelf’ compliance elearning packages are so awful

As readers of this blog will be aware, I work in education, and specialise in areas of quality online and blended learning. When people ask me what I do – I try really hard to explain to them (whilst watching the blood run from their faces) but if they don’t themselves work in education, it is quite hard to describe, and for a lot of people, their only knowledge or experience of online learning, is the awful compliance training that they may have had to do as part of their work, or their voluntary roles within the scouts, as part of their cricket coaching award, or because they are a Governor at the local school (note: all 3 of these voluntary options apply to me!)

I hate these training packages – for multiple reasons; they are in general low quality, quite often learning doesn’t actually take place, and because these are so widely used, they almost become a very low bench mark for elearning expectations which impacts on other areas of work. Quite a lot of these will force people to watch a video to the very end before you can proceed without the ability to listen at 1.5 speed, or fast forward/rewind. Others will give you options of what you want to look at on a slide, but you have to look at everything before you can continue. Some will have text appearing line by line very slowly (slower than I read), and most have some badly designed multiple choice quiz at the end where you have to get 7 out of 10 right to be marked as competent – even though intelligent guesswork alone would get you 5 out of 10, and what is really worrying is how poor most of these are in terms of accessibility.

So why are these packages so bad?

People often question why these packages are such low quality, and if you think through the market forces in play, it is actually quite easy to work out why.

Firstly it is a very crowded market – there are dozens if not hundreds of providers offering standard packages on safeguarding, GDPR awareness, Manual handling etc so each provider is trying to sell their content cheaper than the rivals, which means they have to produce them for less money to be profitable. However, the bigger factor here, is they want to create something where everyone is going to ‘pass’ the training – the reason why organisations pay for these packages, is they don’t want to run the training themselves. If they have a high percentage of people not passing the training, they then have to educate these people another way, which defeats the purpose of going down this route. The result of this is creating packages that are very easy to pass, hence the badly designed quizzes at the end of the activity. In reality, if allowed to do so, most people could jump to the quiz at the end, achieve the pass score without reading the content, and complete this piece of learning in about 10 minutes. Because 10 minutes is far too short a time for a piece of compulsory learning to take place, is why a lot of these packages have the text appearing line by line slowly, and why they force you to watch the videos in full – this is simply a mechanism to artificially elongate the training time, so when someone looks at the reports, they can see that everyone spent at least an hour doing this training package.

Another factor, is that most of these packages are created in something called SCORM (If you don’t know what SCORM is then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharable_Content_Object_Reference_Model), which makes sense because SCORM is the ‘industry standard’ – but the SCORM technology is very old, and realistically out of date – so it almost always has a ‘dated’ look to it, is always going to create an accessibility barrier (even if what is inside the package is created well), and SCORM is designed to work on systems where people have fast and reliable internet connections – which in the workplace is often the case, but for people working at home, and potentially via the 3G/4G networks – isn’t a given, which can cause problems for the users, and for the central admins, as the tracking can be affected if the user loses their internet connection at the ‘wrong time’.

Is there another way?

Personally I believe that the foundation of quality learning is the interactions between teacher-student and student-student, which is the same for classroom based face to face learning and online learning. Online learning is very capable of using these interactions, but not for the mass produced stand-alone compliance training that I am talking about here. When I create content for clients, I try to make better use of the media available, create more challenging and realistic assessment activities, and I try to recognise who my audience is and create content accordingly, and as with all the content I create, accessibility is built in as standard, as well as things being designed to work well on mobile devices. If I can, I build in some teacher-student or student-student interactions, but that isn’t always possible. But (and this is a big but) – this all costs money to do, which is why it isn’t scalable to the mass markets.

So having lost the human interactions, we are left with the ‘automated transfer of knowledge’ approach. We could make the assessment activities more rigorous which would then encourage people to put more effort into the learning, and hopefully more learning would take place – but this would then present the aforementioned problem of more people not-completing and also raised anxiety levels for the people undertaking the ‘training’. If people are generally interested in what they are learning, then they will put in more effort to read and understand the content, however with compliance training – most people are not that interested, so they are doing this under duress as something they have to just try and get through with as little pain as possible.

Technologically, we ought to be moving away from SCORM, and towards things like xAPI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_API). This transition has been very slow, as whilst SCORM is the industry standard, most of the content factories will use this format only. It is only if enough people start asking for and demanding something better, that the industry will start to properly change.

So – I cannot offer any magic solutions in terms of the creation of these packages, what I can offer though – is that the organisations buying them need to really evaluate the use of them before they purchase. What is the purpose of going down this route? Are you wanting to change peoples’ behaviour so they are more GDPR compliant, or deal with safeguarding better – if so, then these online packages are not the solution, you need to look at hiring in a decent trainer and someone that can manage the strategic side of CPD activity within the organisation. If you are doing this, simply as a tick box activity to cover your back in case there is an issue, then fair enough – this process does that, but do evaluate the content carefully before purchasing:

• Don’t just look at the ‘demo’ module that they provide (which will be created to a much higher standard), pick one of the other items from the catalogue to look at (if they refuse, then walk away).
• Is this learning in SCORM format – is there a similar product in a better format?
• Get multiple people to look at these so you have different opinions.
• Get someone to do an accessibility analysis of the package to identify any potential problems, and what are you going to do if these problems arise.
• Test the packages on different devices and different browsers to see how they behave.

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