“That compliance course was fun!”
How often have you heard learners say that? Well, hardly ever.
Compliance courses are a way of educating employees on rules, regulations and organizational policies that apply to an employee’s day-to-day job responsibilities. Compliance training is the top priority for all organizations; however, it doesn’t usually excite the learners. The first thing that comes to one’s mind when they hear about online compliance courses is “long hours of content download.” These courses remain in the to-do list of employees until the deadline to take them looms large. Though organizations need to ensure that employees complete these trainings, employees do not enjoy taking the courses and hence effective knowledge transfer doesn’t happen.
So how do you make compliance courses exciting in a way that can make the employees ‘want’ to take them rather than ‘have’ to? Here are four easy strategies that you can use.
- Assess your Learners
One type of design approach won’t be suitable for all your learners. Some learners would have taken the course earlier so they may prefer to look at only the new content. On the other hand, some learners could be beginners and need to go through the entire training. So, to devise an appropriate learning strategy that works best, assess all learners before providing them with the content. You can do this by creating a pre-test which will help determine if a learner needs only a part of the course or the entire training. You can then categorize the information as ‘must-know,’ ‘good-to-know’ and ‘nice-to-know,’ and use this to create effective design and development strategies.
- Create Smaller Content Bites
Often compliance training intimidates learners because of its duration. Creating small, bite-sized, stand-alone chunks as micro-learning nuggets will give learners the freedom of starting and completing the training as per their convenience. Learners can take the course while commuting or as a breather between their routine work tasks.
- Make it Device Friendly
Today, when everything is “mobile”, you can’t limit online learning to desktops only. Employees prefer training material that can be accessed on-the-go. Making compliance training accessible on mobile devices will help ease out the burden associated with it; learners don’t necessarily need to fit the courses during their workday but can complete them in their spare time.
- Make it Fun!
Think of ways to make the courses engaging and fun for learners. You can use one or a combination of the following strategies:
- Adding a Character: Include a character or an avatar in your compliance course to make it more relatable, interactive, and engaging. Choose a character that learners can relate to and use it effectively to guide through the training material.
- Adding Videos: Create an engaging experience by integrating videos that enhance/supplement the content. The videos can have senior management reinforcing the value of complying with policies, or can be created using illustrations or images and stylized text with a powerful audio narration.
- Storytelling: Who doesn’t like stories? Stories have the power to stimulate interest and retention even in the case of compliance courses. Based on the sensitivity of the topic, you could create a fictional story and add characters that relate to the topic as well as the learners. Your stories can be humorous, surprising or emotional. A well-written story has the power to hook learners to any kind of course.
- Adding Scenarios: Scenarios provide a realistic context to learners to help rehearse the relevant skills in a simulated environment. Create challenging scenarios that learners can connect with and think about “how they would react” to a given situation.
- Gamifying it: We all love playing games. You could create informative games for your compliance courses that are also relevant to the training context. Include activities and tasks for learners that they must perform, keeping in mind the organization’s policies and procedures. Creating compliance courses as games where learners take up new challenges, earn rewards or tokens to qualify to the next level will make learners look at these course as a fun activity.
These are some ways to make the online compliance courses more fun and interesting. Have you spiced up your compliance courses? What are some of the strategies that you used to make them engaging? Share your comments here.
