I’m not a fan of a lot of the compliance e-learning I see. They are often boring and the relevance to the learner is poorly articulated. The topics are usually important; policy and safety-related. Unfortunalty, in a lot of cases, the instructional approach and media used does not reflect the significance of the topics.

Nevertheless, organisations make a decision to implement these courses (usually to reduce corporate risk), and a lot of effort is put into implementation. Staff are instructed to complete these mandatory courses. Maybe the reason for completing the e-learning courses has been well articulated, or maybe not. Nevertheless, the e-learning courses have been deemed mandatory. So, what does this mean?

Mandatory assumes someone will look up the LMS SCORM report and see that all staff members have passed the course and have completed it in the anticipated timeframe. That’s what SCORM standards are for – to provide these reports. So, how come the reporting and follow-up is often so poorly actioned?

If you are communicating “this course is mandatory” then, ensure there are processes in place to reinforce these instructions. If you don’t, you risk the following:

1. De-value the e-learning strategy
2. Put the organisation at industrial relations risk
3. Put the learner at risk
4. Put at risk any future “mandatory” courses

What is a satisfactory e-learning completion rate?

Really, mandatory e-learning cannot have any less than a 100% completion rate. Anything less than 100% has failed the meaning of ‘mandatory’ (**see below). A hundred percent of your cohort must complete the mandatory e-learning course and passed the assessment (if assessment was included).

Additionally, individual’s completion should be within about 30% of your expected completion time. i.e. use your SCORM reports to identify people who completed a 30 minute course in less than 20 minutes.

Key Messages for mandatory e-learning

1. Have a policy in place so that everyone is clear of the consequences if a mandatory e-learning course is not completed in the allocated time
2. Have a clear allocated time period in which staff must complete mandatory e-learning courses e.g. within 30 days of joining the organisation
3. Make sure managers know their role in ensuring staff have opportunity to complete mandatory e-learning courses
4. Ensure someone is tasked to run reports
5. Make sure the person who runs the reports has a mandate to a) contact those who have not completed the course and find out why (look for genuine issues)  b) action consequences for non-completions (or too quickly completed, in the case of non-assessed e-learning courses)
6. Evaluate your mandatory e-learning courses to a) ensure people are able to correctly apply their learning into the workplace after completion b) get user feedback to help inform future instructional approaches

** To achieve 100% completion rate you need to be confident that your course is tracking correctly on all operating environments, or you will have lots of staff who will say “I did complete the course, but the system isn’t registering it – it’s not my fault“. Be sure to do lot’s of testing before releasing a mandatory course.

Here is a list of questions to ask an e-learning provider before you engage them. Thank you to Zoe Karathomas for allowing me to share our combined thoughts:

1. Have you worked with clients of a similar size/industry to ours? (and can I have a list of recent referees to contact?)
2. Have you developed similar materials and content to ours? (and can we see recent demos?)
3. Can you explain to us your instructional design methodology?
4. Will all development be done locally? (off-shoring may be cost-effective - but you need to ensure the communication channel is sound)
5. How do you assure our IP and source files are safe?
6. What strategies will you put into place to future-proof the finished e-learning course? (e.g. do you have the ability to export the course to multiple file formats for use on mobile devices?)
7. Is the e-learning authoring tool you use bespoke, or is it a proprietary tool? (if it is bespoke, this will mean you will need to return to the provider each time you need an update, or you will need to purchase their tool)
8. What guarantee can you provide to ensure the project will be delivered on time and to budget?
9. What is your project management methodology? (in particular, check the frequency of Quality Assurance checks)
10. How frequently will you hold project briefings with us? (and how will you raise and escalate issues?)
11. Do we incur a penalty if we don’t deliver our reviews by the documented due dates?
12. Who in your team will be on the project? What are their qualifications? (and how quickly can their role be filled, should they leave?)

The best way to manage e-learning projects is to have a methodology in place yourself that you can dictate to the e-learning provider. This should be discussed and agreed upon prior to formal vendor engagement.

If you would like assistance in developing an internal e-learning project management methodology and governance, stay tuned. I will be launching a new workshop on this topic in March.

Last month’s podcast was about choosing a Learning Management System.

Episode 21 is the second of the series, exploring things to think about when implementing a Learning Management Sysyetm (LMS). This video tutorial compliments course 5 of the Connect Thinking E-Learning Academy – Choosing and Implementing a Learning Management System – available to Academy members – click here for a demo.

Why not download this free e-learning training resource from iTunes.

Or read the transcript.

Or watch the entire free e-learning tutorial series on our YouTube channel (episode 21 is embedded below).

“What’s love got to do with it?”

- apologies and admiration to Tina Turner

Last week I used the word “Love” to describe the attention to detail required to build a quality e-learn. I later wondered whether the term was a bit “over the top” for readers. Was I portraying my passion for all things ‘e’ with a little too much exuberance? Would anyone know what ’love’ meant in relation to e-learning quality?

I don’t think I have ever met a person working with e-learning who has not been passionate about the medium and the opportunities that learning technologies can and will avail our staff, our learners. But we need to have a little more than passion. We need to understand what quality looks like, how quality is experienced, so that we know how to pay attention to detail during development.

Sometimes it is the people around us that don’t understand the time and effort required to develop an e-learn – the trial and error required to learn the authoring tool – the stretch often required to see beyond the content to find ways to create meaningful activities and scaffold the learning.  Like any multimedia production, e-learning requires good scripting and good visuals to enable a learner to learn through the e-learn. As learning professionals we need time to give e-learning the love and attention it needs to become ‘quality’.

However you can, ensure to work with your reporting manager to get the support you need to create quality e-learns.

And, be an e-learning advocate and ensure poor quality e-learning doesn’t creep onto your Learning Management System (LMS).