Making regulation engaging......can it be done?

Hi Graham,

Making compelling regulations training is definitely tricky. Earlier in my instructional design career, I worked at a bank, so I feel your pain in how challenging it can be to make great e-learning experiences around detailed and complicated regulations.

What my team back then found worked well is much like what Christy Tucker just shared: stories and scenarios. We often started with stories (based on real bank experiences where possible) to help learners see why this content was important and ground how specific regulations played out in their work life. We then used scenarios to give learners guided practice using those rules in common situations at work and then assess their knowledge at the end of the course.

From the learner perspective, this worked fabulously. They found the content more enjoyable than previous content dump courses and were better able to apply it to their actual jobs.

We did sometimes experience pushback, though, with subject matter experts. Some worried that if learners didn't spend all their training time reading the policies verbatim, they wouldn't be as knowledgeable as they needed to be. So you may need to talk through how learning to apply regulations in real-world scenarios is more likely to help people get this content right on the job than memorizing policies without that application context.

For SMEs who have never seen this kind of training and are hesitant to buy in, a single proof of concept story/scenario course (or even just a lesson) may be able to help them see how much this approach can improve on-the-job performance.