Do people think we're goldfish?

Kim Ellis encourages us to think outside the bowl.

It’s been the standard formula for compliance training for as long as there’s been compliance training:

Learning objectives > Content > Quiz > Recap of objectives.

Congratulations, you can now fight the good fight against money laundering.

But there is a better way, and loads of people have been talking about it for years – the problem is, the people who book us to design the training aren’t the ones who want to listen.

They don’t want to change. The formula works for them. It’s tidy. They can write a report to the powers that be and say 100% of their staff completed the Anti-Money Laundering eLearning and scored at least 80% the assessment. The powers that be then put that into a report for a governing body, and they get a nice fancy compliance stamp for another year.

They sit back in their ivory towers, smug in the knowledge that they’ve saved the business from the corrupt scammers for another year… Or have they?

Goldfish learning

See, the problem with this formula of content, and I’ve seen it for non-compliance stuff too, is that it doesn’t actually have the impact people think it will. I mean, think about it, can you remember the seven data protection principles from your last round of GDPR training? I blooming build the training and I’d have to give it a Google to get them all!

What the powers that be (and insert your particular power here, stakeholder, client, training manager, etc) don’t understand is that just throwing content together and then quizzing people on it isn’t good. Because it’s treating your people like they’re goldfish, give them some info and test them straight away to make sure they’ve remembered it… goldfish mentality.

And don’t come at me saying that’s the embedding stage of the learning content. Testing people straight away with a multiple-choice quiz isn’t embedding!

Testing straight away is testing to see if their prefrontal cortex is working and they have some form of short-term memory – not whether they understand, care, or can apply what they’ve learned.

If you want people to remember and act on what they learn, you need to make them feel something. You need to create an emotional connection. You need to make it mean something so that your people actually care about the content.

Real content. Real people. Real experiences.

When I built the Anti-Money Laundering eLearning for an online bookmaker, the powers that be said I needed all the legislation in there so they could tick their box to say it was included. So I had very little power with that side of things; all I could do with it was design it in a way that wouldn’t make people want to claw their eyes out or fall asleep. So I got creative.

We did a photoshoot with the contact centre team and featured them throughout the course. They loved it – suddenly they were mini celebrities in the office. It created a buzz around the eLearning that I honestly wasn’t expecting.

Then came the quiz. The LMS needed to track completions. They wanted a pass percentage mark. I pushed back – but as ever, it was an uphill battle.

So, I created a video-based scenario which was a little like a choose-your-own-adventure story (if you’re old enough to remember those). Again, I used people from within the business and put them in real situations, then the learner would see what happened based on their choices.

It would have been easy for me to write 20 multiple-choice questions and have the course pull a random 10 for each person, then give them three attempts on each question and as many resits as they wanted. It would have saved a heck of a lot of time, but I knew what would happen.

People would rush through the main content as quickly as possible to reach the quiz, where they could choose the longest answers or those that say ‘all of the above’ and keep retesting until they achieved 80%.

However, this approach required them to think about their answers, consider the content and apply it to real situations. Rather than being treated like a regurgitating goldfish, they were now doing real problem-solving and seeing what the results would be, based on their decisions. And that’s the shift we need.

Let’s stop designing for reports

Next time a client or stakeholder says they want a 10-question assessment in their eLearning, try and convince them there’s a better way.

Forget the reports - let’s start designing training that actually works. I mean, if you really want to shake things up, test people first. If they already know it – let them skip the course. Wild idea, I know. That might be a tad too controversial for most people, though!

Kim Ellis is an instructional Designer and founder of L&D Free Spirits. Connect with her here: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-ellis-20023857and learn more about L&D Free Spirits here:ldfreespirits.com