Forum Discussion
elearning as an evidence package for legal team
I developed a lot of courses for a company in the highly regulated medical-device industry. For reviews, I'd create Word documents that included a 2-column table. In each row on the left, I inserted a screenshot of a slide (or block). As needed, I added notes about interactions and would use extra rows to show that content. Reviewers entered their comments in the column on the right. I'd respond to comments by graying out the old row, and inserting an updated screenshot in a new row. (Even after Review 360 was implemented, we still used this method.)
One of the great things about this was, when everything was finalized, I could simply delete the right-hand column and the "old" rows to get a detailed version of the final course. That's what the legal folks would give when the FDA wanted to see what was in it. It wasn't searchable, but I never got any pushback about that.
Yes, this method is labor intensive. But it does provide an excellent record of the content.
Hi Judy, thanks for your response! We have an effective review process; what I'm looking for is what are others doing that need to provide their course to legal teams to defend in court. For example, an employee violates a security policy or sexual harassment policy, and our legal team takes our product to court as evidence that they were aware of and had acknowledged those policies. In the past with courses that were primarily text and/or narration, we provided a text version that could be used in court to describe what was seen and heard. Now with very interactive courses, a text version is not really indicitive of the participant's live experience. Are others providing video versions of the course along with word versions? What are you providing as evidence packages to your legal teams? I'm hoping to learn others' best practices.
Let me clarify: The legal team got a document with screenshots and notes about interactions. That showed the images and text that a user would have seen in the course. (For this company, it started as a review file. But such a document could be created just for legal purposes.)
The LMS tracked course completion, which usually meant passing a quiz at the end of the course.
That combination could be used to show that an employee or contractor had been given the content in the policy/procedure covered by the course.
In some cases, there was also a read-and-acknowledge attached to the actual policy/procedure document.
And, as I recall, we sometimes put an acknowledgement statement into a course.