Instructional Design

In developing its employment law courses, Brightline Compliance combines its nationally-known legal expertise with critically-acclaimed instructional design to give employees accurate, practical and engaging compliance and ethics training. In evaluating the quality of online or instructor-led compliance and ethics courses, you should consider the following questions:

1.  Are your courses practical and not legalistic?
2.  Do your courses teach employees obvious principles that they already know?
3.  Are your courses interactive?

1. Are your courses practical and not legalistic?
   
   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 crave the practical information that they need to comply with the law. As a result, Brightline Compliance rarely cites cases or statutes in its training. Instead, Brightline
   
   
   • Distills the statutes, cases, and regulations into clear behavioral principles
   • Teaches employees those behavioral principles, and
   • Asks employees to apply those principles to the nuances of real-life scenarios that they may encounter in the workplace.
   
   
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2. 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 nuances of the "gray area" situations. By focusing on the gray areas, employees find the training intellectually interesting and they leave the course with knowledge that they did not have before. Thus, they feel like they gained valuable information rather than simply listened to a lecture.
   
   
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3. 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.
   
   
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