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.