One of the challenges of having e-learning live on the LMS is course review and maintenance. I call this the “Sustain” phase of the ADDIES model.

Often compliance-related courses and technical courses are originally sponsored by subject matter experts (SMEs). The e-learning development is commonly centralised through the Learning and Development (L&D) e-learning team who may or may not work with an external e-learning provider to have the course built.

The input of the SME is critical to the accuracy of the content, as well as the holistic ‘grass-roots’ strategy of ensuring staff are across the content (i.e. the SME is typically responsible for e-learning content, intranet content, policy, brochures and posters, workplace assessment and face to face training).

The input of the e-learning team is critical to ensure instructional approaches, learning objectives and assessment, testing, evaluation and overall project management of the e-learning course is sound.

The e-learning team will usually monitor course usage and user feedback and report the status to the SME. But the e-learning team are not subject experts, and so sustaining the course is typically the responsibility of the SME.

Amongst other things, “Sustain” is about ensuring the course content is up-to-date and accurate. It’s about ensuring the URLs are live. The SME must take responsibility to communicate timeframes to the e-learning team if a change to policy or legislation is expected. From here, a plan can be made between the e-learning team and the SME to update the course. This is a good time to include the feedback of the current course, so that the update can address both content and usability/user acceptance issues.

Below I have created a general list of tasks of a typical ADDIES lifecycle of a policy or technical-related e-learning course (click to enlarge the image). Allocate responsibilities to match your organisation’s preference for doing things. Of course, shared responsibility and partnership is ideal. However, principal responsibility for each task should be agreed at the start of an e-learning project.

If you are a member of the Connect Thinking E-Learning Academy, this table is available to you under the Resources tab, in an editable Word format, along with a host of other e-learning project tools and process documents.

A question from a client in organisational learning:

How long will it take to develop an e-learning course with an external e-learning developer?

Well, my first reaction to this question is “how long is a piece of string?”, but that’s not a very helpful response. So, let me try and put some certainty into this response.

In my experience, a 30 minute module of policy-type content (e.g. EEO, OHS) will take about 3 months to develop. This time varies depending on:

• How ‘clean’ the content is when the content is handed to the e-learning developer i.e. whether you have already done some work on content inclusions/exclusions, assessment etc.
• How interactive you want the e-learning course to be.
• Whether the e-learning developer has developed content for this topic before.
• Whether the e-learning developer knows your organisation and/or your industry.
• Whether the e-learning provider has enough staff to cover your e-learning development, should a project team member leave (the e-learning fraternity is very transient).
• How experienced you are internally in project managing e-learning development.
• How experienced you are with your LMS i.e. how much certainty do you have that various authoring tools and assessment types track properly on your LMS.
• How quickly you can get sign off on each milestone.

What are e-learning development milestones?

Typically the e-learning developer will provide you with a project plan that highlights milestones where the client is responsible for sign-off. This provides certainty to the e-learning developer trying to mitigate re-writes and re-development. Milestones commonly occur at:

• Design plan – a high level agreement on how the e-learning will be treated from a design/navigation perspective.
• Storyboard completion – the client is expected to interpret the storyboard correctly and agree that it is correct prior to authoring.
• “Gold” - this term refers to course completion. There are no errors, mistakes or functional issues remaining.

For good measure, it’s useful to have a number of other, perhaps less formal sign-offs such as script, graphics etc. Be sure to keep emails as proof of various decisions you make along the way.

Milestones usually signal payment e.g. 20% : 40% :40%

A word of warning

Delay in sign-off on the client side costs the e-learning developer money. Some developers charge a penalty for late sign-off as agreed in the original project plan. If you know your organisation is often late at signing off projects, then ensure the project plan reflects adequate time on your side. e.g. a typical e-learning developer project allows 3-5 days for client sign-off. If you need to engage a lot of stakeholders for sign-off internally, you may need to request a 10 day turnaround.

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A number of smaller organisations (400-1800 employees or so) talk to me about beginning an e-learning strategy for their employees, and I’m excited for them. Three aspects to technology for learning are what enables e-learning to be viable for smaller organisations today.

1. Enablement.
This is about prioritising e-learning effort towards enabling employees to do what they need to do to be successful in their role. Sure, compliance training is important for small organisations. But I challenge the effort of creating large e-learns and implementing a LMS to track completion and pass/fail for some small organisation. Of course, compliance may be the business driver that funds the learning technology initiative in the first place. My point is to simply be mindful of the effort versus return. Perhaps continuing with face to face compliance training and sign-off sheets is the more viable option. Or, to perhaps make more robust the capturing of completion, initiate trackable online quizzes, and keep the content in well written paper-based policies and face to face deliveries.

2. Agile content.
It’s a truism that much of the useful information that people use to upskill or solve problems in the workplace becomes redundant within 12-18 months. And, if you spend days or weeks developing a learning solution for a small number of employees, then an 18 month self-life may not be worth the effort. Remember, for every additional day building a ‘sexy’ e-learn is a day away from other L&D work. Often, some simple instructional design principles used well is all that’s required to build an effective 15 minute e-learn in 2-3 days.

What is agile content?
For the L&D practitioner, agile content is that which is simple to design, produce, distribute and update. It is free from the LMS, residing in platforms that are easy to search and no more than 1 click from workflow.
For the employee, agile content is succinct, easy to digest and can be embedded in a place that suits the individual, such as browser favourites, via RSS or through bookmarking functionality.

3. Employee as producers.
Many employees are producers at home. They work with online photos, produce family and so forth. Additionally, many employees have long been producers of expert content, at presentations and in leadership and coaching situations. The technology that enables employees to be producers is relatively inexpensive. Consider Camtasia or the stand-along learn/share platform Bloomfire.

To be successful, many of these employees simply need a bit of tuition about how to create a piece of learning from instructional, visual, project management and authoring tool perspectives. If you can be clear on purpose, topic and quality, then employees may well be able to self-regulate, produce and share their expertise in a technology medium. As L&D, our role is to support them and maybe do a bit of editing to help their success.

So, before embarking on an e-learning technology strategy, consider these three technology aspects and how valuable they may be for your overall learning strategy purpose and outcome.

I had the opportunity this week to be a participant in a ‘think tank’ discussion on the role of e-learning in compliance training (e.g. Code of Conduct, Privacy Policy etc). This was especially timing, as a client and I have been investigating how successful e-learning is in informing staff about their rights and responsibilities. I have spoken with e-learning providers and organisations, and have realised there is appears to be no agreed learning design formula for this kind of training.

What are the e-learning design requirements that help ensure learners are informed?

An interesting question that came from the ‘think tank’ was “Are we trying to mitigate risk or change behaviour?” If it’s to mitigate risk, then what have the courts deemed as appropriate training, assessment and auditing? If it’s to change behaviour, then what strategies in conjunction with training can organisations undertake to change and sustain behaviour?

I’ve longed believed self-directed e-learning rarely changes behaviour. Social e-learning may, such as online games and role-plays where tension is present, and judgement and consequences are experienced, but I don’t have the data on this. Conversations between peers and with managers may change behaviour. And sustained corporate comms helps to ensure staff remain informed of their rights, responsibilities, and consequences should poicy be breached..

In 2006 the State of California mandated all employers with over 50 emoloyees had to provide 2 hours of EEO training every 2 years (AB 1825). The learning design (classroom, e-learning, webinar) must meet minimum standards such as 2 hrs duration, interactive, scenario-based, assessment, accesses to subject expert etc. At least there has been effort in this state to try to define effective compliance learning design. We need this kind of guidance in Australia too.

Perhaps this specific guidance on legislation-related compliance training is available and I just don’t know about it. Please let me know if you know of any specific standards.

My conclusion: I think well designed, scenario-based, engaging and relevant e-learning with assessment, LMS tracking and access to 1:1 support can help organisations to inform staff of their rights and responsibilities, and can thereby help mitigate risk to the organisation. We need to ensure e-learning is offered only to staff who have the skills to learn from e-learning, and provide classroom training to other staff. Finally, no training event should be provided in isolation, and L&D staff need to work together with policy-makers and corporate comms to design a strategy that will continue to remind staff and create relevance for the policy, with the ultimate goal of sustaining a workplace culture that is free from poor behaviour.

Idea: As part of the think tank discussion, I did throw in the idea of certain staff subgroups (e.g. Graduates) creating small podcasts on what a policy such as Code of Conduct means to them in their context. Perhaps groups of 3-4, 5 minutes duration, judged by using a rubric that outlines expected synthesis of the policy etc. This stems from my post last week that referred to “Employees as producers” – what a geat way to use employee content to distribute key culture messages, and create a memorable learning experience.

Post Script: Julian Fenwick of Blake Dawson who organised the ‘think tank’ has written a follow-up article entitled How to create a culture of compliance, which can be downloaded here.