E-Learning Heroes - Advice and ideas from the Articulate Community

I'm developing a compliance training that has to be a certain length time-wise by law. Of course, I approached the design and content development as I would for any other course. It's based on relevant, actionable objectives and focuses on what learners should be able to do at the end of the course. But the content doesn't meet the required time limit (which is absurdly long).

Have you had a similar issue? What would you do? Add content even though you know it won't make the course any better? I can still make extra content engaging; I just hate the idea of having to add filler just to meet a mandate. If you have any creative ideas, please share!

Hi there Laura, can you tell us about the topic of the trainign and who is mandating the time length? And do they have stipulations about what can "count" against the time length? Could you give the learner assignments or practice time (i.e., the in-person kind, not e-learning), and have their supervisor give documentation that "counts" against the mandatory time? Are there additional activities or practice exercises that you could bake into the training, to cover crucial skills?

Hi Laura,

I have the same issue with a WBT at our hospital. The way we have interpreted the requirements is that we provide two hours worth of training. How we do this is by adding a ton of hyperlinks that are relevent to the topic. If people choose to click them it could be two hours or more of training. We've done this for years and have never had a problem. I would really look at the requirement and see if you can interpret it the same way.

Saenna, the training is regulated by the government; we're looking into what can count. I like your ideas for giving in-person practice, but I'm not sure that'll actually work in this case. I'll keep it in mind for the future, though. Lynn, I had your idea -- just add relevant resources (documents, web pages, etc.), but that doesn't seem to be going over well. I'd like to add an asynchronous online discussion area, but we'll see. I'd love to hear any other ideas out there. Thanks for sharing!

What is the course about Laura?

Hi Laura...

I have two thoughts.

First, the requirements for compliance courses often don't make good sense. You can fight the good fight and make your case, but when it's turned down for the sake of "the rules," you just have to consider that fighting any further is like trying to hold the tide back with a sponge.

So the question becomes (as you've noted) how to you add material in a useful way to meet the time requirement?

I looked at your website and it looks like you're doing safety training or HR courses. So here's the second thought along those lines...

You've already produced the content that meets the objectives (to avoid this accident or that pitfall). See if you can find or make up one or more scenarios for each of those accidents or pitfalls to use as examples or case studies to back up your content. These could be framed as linear content, like "Joe did this, and this is the result'" followed by "If Joe had done this instead, THIS would have been the result."

Or you could build some interactivity in the scenarios. Set the scene, give the user a list of choices, and with hyperlinking of customized feedback in Quizmaker, explain the consequences -- both positive and negative -- of the choice made.

If you can add a dollar amount to what each poor decision costs the company (or what each good decision saved the company), your stakeholders will love it.

On the one hand, you could look at this as "padding" the material. But on the other hand, you could look at this as reinforcing the lessons you've taught.

Hope that helps... and don't let 'em make you crazy with requirements that don't make good training sense. It'll only make you go bald.

Best Regards,

Dave

Hello all,

We are a software development company and we plan to customize an open source LMS to work with the currently available Articulate generated content (in SCORM 1.2). Our client has asked for a feature that is exactly what Laura described. I wonder if there is any way we can solve this issue technically. For example accumulating total amount of time a learner spends in a course then when he reaches the end of the course but has not meet the time limit requirement, he will be forced to go back to the course to do something (I know this's worse than adding extra content to the course but just in case the client doesn't have available extra content to add)

Thanks,

-Ha

Hi Laura,

Situations like that are never fun. However they are common and becoming more so as mandated compliance training seems to be one of the fastest growing segments of our industry. So...

A favorite tactic of mine for this sort of thing is the classic "Scavenger Hunt".

As suggested earlier by Lynn, a list of extra resources is great and easy/cheap to create. Simply add a list of facts, quotes, details, etc they need to find at those resources. You could even score it like a quiz if you needed to, or not.

It gives the learner something to do, fills the time, has a meaasurable result, and is easy to create.

Hope this helps,

Bob

I did a little research and found that technically, SCORM 1.2 has a feature for calculating the total amount of time a student spends in a course (http://www.vsscorm.net/2009/07/14/step-17-cmi-core-total_time-and-cmi-core-session_time). 

-Ha