Training Considerations
In evaluating online workplace compliance and ethics training, you should consider the following training questions.
- Are your courses practical and not legalistic?
- Do your courses teach employees obvious principles that they already know?
- Are your courses interactive?
- Can you ensure active participation in your courses?
- Are your courses customized to our policies and work environment?
- What if an employee taking the online course has a question?
- Are your courses AICC and SCORM compliant?
- Can we run the courses and track course completion on Brightline's Learning Management System?
- Can we integrate your courses with our Learning Management System?
- Are your courses practical and not legalistic?
Workplace compliance and ethics courses should be legally accurate but never legalistic. Your employees don't care about the history and theory of the law. Instead, they want to learn the practical skills they need to comply with the law. As a result, Brightline Compliance rarely cites cases or statutes in its training. Instead, Brightline's courses:
- Distill the statutes, cases, and regulations into clear behavioral principles
- Teach employees those behavioral principles, and
- Require employees to apply those principles to the nuances of real-life scenarios that they may encounter in the workplace.
- Do your courses teach employees obvious principles that they already know?
Instead of providing a simplistic list of "do's" and "don'ts," compliance and ethics courses should focus on exploring the complex "gray area" situations. By focusing on the gray areas, employees find the training intellectually interesting, and they leave the course with knowledge that they didn't have before. Thus, they feel like they learned valuable information rather than simply listened to a lecture.
- Are your courses interactive?
Training Media Review evaluated Brightline Compliance's online course, Preventing Workplace Harassment, and the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) published a portion of this review in its T & D Magazine. The review began:
"Finally, an exciting e-learning experience!"
Read the review
Online compliance and ethics courses should be highly interactive and include numerous engaging exercises that help employees explore the nuances of the law. Each of Brightline's courses is structured around scenarios that depict complicated work scenarios. Key issues raised by the scenarios are discussed and guidance is given on behaviors that are potentially problematic. Interactive exercises then allow learners to apply what they have just learned. For instance, in one such exercise in Brightline's online harassment course, learners inspect a workplace to decide whether a number of potentially harassing items (e.g., photographs, calendars, websites, and e-mails) are inappropriate in the workplace.
The best way to gauge the quality of an online course is to view the course yourself. To view a demo of one of Brightline's online courses, click here.
- Can you ensure active participation in your courses?
Some online training simply allows employees to log in and keep clicking through the course's pages without having to interact with the course instruction. To ensure that employees actually receive the instruction contained in each section of Brightline's courses, employees cannot move forward until they complete each page, which typically requires significant user interaction. They cannot enter a course's final section, the Quiz Show, until they have completed each of the course's sections.
The required interactivity not only provides for good training but also provides important legal protection. You can prove not only that each of your employees took the training, but also that they actually were required to actively learn the material. This is in stark contrast to watching a video or listening to a lecture, where employees may passively "tune out" of the instruction.
- Are your courses customized to our policies and work environment?
For many employees to believe that the training is applicable to them, the course has to look and feel like their organization. Brightline Compliance customizes its clients' courses to reflect the organization's work environment and specific policies. For example, Brightline's courses are tailored to clients in the following ways:
- The client's logo appears on each page of the course.
- The introduction section of the course includes:
- An audio or video message from an official with the organization explaining the importance of the training
- Various photographs of the organization's employees and workplaces
- The courses instruct specifically on the organization's applicable policies and reporting procedures.
In addition, clients may further customize Brightline's online courses to look even more like their work environments. For example, Brightline can customize scenarios to take place in the client's workplace. Brightline can even add scenarios to a course to deal with issues that the client is particularly concerned about. Brightline's online courses are built on a sophisticated technological platform that allows Brightline to make such changes quickly and inexpensively.
- What if an employee taking the online course has a question?
In classroom-based training, employee questions, and the answers to those questions, can often be the most valuable part of the course. However, in classroom-based training, employees are unlikely to ask questions about a sensitive topic or ask a question that might reveal themselves as a possible victim of harassment or as someone who has, perhaps unknowingly, violated the law or committed an ethical violation.
Brightline offers an "Ask the Expert" feature that allows employees to ask anonymous questions and receive answers offline. An official designated by your organization or, for an additional fee, by Brightline Compliance, answers the questions. Both the question and answer are posted to a moderated whiteboard that all learners can view. In this way, individual learners can receive feedback on their questions while all learners can gain additional understanding from the questions asked by others. If your organization is not interested in using this feature, Brightline can simply provide a link to a list of "Frequently Asked Questions" instead.
While we believe that this "Ask the Expert" feature is important in any online course, it is particularly important when organizations are training to comply with supervisory sexual harassment training laws in California and Connecticut. Both of these laws require online training to provide a means for employees to ask questions and have those questions answered promptly.
To learn more about how the "Ask the Expert" feature works, contact us.
- Are your courses AICC and SCORM compliant?
Brightline's online courses are built to be AICC and SCORM compliant.
- Can we run the courses and track course completion on Brightline's Learning Management System?
At no additional cost, Brightline offers clients use of its learning management system to run courses and track course completion. Brightline's LMS is powered by Element K's KnowledgeHub learning platform. Used by several Fortune 500 companies, the KnowledgeHub LMS provides clients sophisticated and user-friendly features for both the learner and administrator. Rolling out courses and ensuring 100% completion is a breeze with this LMS.
- Can we integrate your courses with our Learning Management System?
Clients can choose to either access the courses from Brightline's learning management system (LMS) or on the client's own LMS. Brightline can quickly and easily integrate its courses with any AICC or SCORM compliant LMS, and has done so numerous times. For example, Brightline has provided its courses on, among others, the following LMS's:
- Aspen Enterprise Learning Platform (Click2learn)
- Blackboard
- BlueCube Enterprise Workforce Management Suite
- Cornerstone
- Docent
- Knowledge Hub (Element K)
- Learn.com
- Meridian KSI Knowledge Centre
- PeopleSoft Enterprise Learning Management
- Plateau Learning Management System
- Ready SolutionsTM learning management system
- Softscape
- Techbooks LMS
- The Learning Connection (Maritz)
- TotalLMSTM (SumTotal)
- Training Mine (Frontline)
- Training Partner (GeoMetrix)
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