Tata Interactive Systems

Compliance Training: Key Challenges

Regulatory and compliance training has always been a thorn in the flesh of training managers. There are the regulatory authorities to satisfy as they want records of training completion; there are the reporting managers to reckon with because they don’t want their wards to be off their workplace for too long; there are the learners to manage, because they don’t particularly find the content interesting. Then there is the business end of it – how do you ensure that compliance training leads to compliance, and how does that lead to an improvement in organizational performance? Answers have been sought, with limited success. Little wonder then that compliance training has been long on rhetoric and short on transformational approaches. Here are five key challenges in developing e-learning courses in compliance training.

Awards Season for Tata Interactive

Gifts in the festive season are normal and welcome, but awards are even better. And when we landed two awards this month, we couldn’t stop smiling. So allow us to preen a bit.

Quality vs. Speed

This month, the Learning Circuits Blog threw up another toughie.

What are the trade offs between quality learning programs and rapid e-learning and how do you decide?

We tossed the question to two of our colleagues. An instructional designer brings the (surprise, surprise!) learner into the picture while a business manager puts his nose to the grindstone (and the client to the forefront) as the two of them put mouse to mouse pad.

Dr. Shwetaleena Bidyadhar, Senior Instructional Designer

I would like to approach the ‘Big Question’ of this month from a Need Saliency perspective.

Most motivation theories stress that intrinsic factors (such as job satisfaction) are higher order motivators and should be valued more than extrinsic factors (like money). Is this necessarily true? In reality, an individual’s needs may be intrinsic, extrinsic, or some combination of both.

The Need Saliency Theory (Kanungo, 1982b) evolved as an alternative approach to such theories. It states that our involvement in a job depends on its potential to satisfy our salient needs. We should first identify an individual’s/group’s priorities and then look for ways to satisfy these, rather than make generalizations about what would motivate them. Is there a lesson in this for us? Should we label a design strategy as being of ‘better quality’ in isolation of learner profile and training requirements? Based on this theory, can we draw a parallel to the issue of rapid vs. quality e-learning?

When designing an e-learning course, quality learning products may seem like the ideal thing to recommend. We know that this approach inevitably means more design and development time. It also leads to higher costs. Does this approach always translate into enhanced learning retention and a high return on investment? Is the degree of correlation between these variables significant?  Is something that is interesting for us to design equally interesting for a learner to go through?

The underlying assumption that rapid e-learning does not lead to quality learning may be questioned. Rapid e-learning has its uses and applications. It may suit certain types of learners and situational requirements better. It also brings higher benefits to clients by reducing development costs and ‘time to learning.’

The design decision should be arrived at after a detailed analysis and evaluation of all information available. We should not approach this stage with the preconceived notion that rapid learning means ‘less learning’.

Borrowing terminology from research methodology, if ‘design decision’ is an independent variable’ and ‘effective transfer of this learning’ is the dependent variable, some of the moderating variables could be:

• User psychographics
• Type of content
• Desired level of learning
• Immediacy of need for learning
• Delivery medium or blend suitable
• Budget

A rule of thumb could be to use rapid e-learning where the important learning material is structured, and simple. It can be ideal for easy-to-memorize skills or for highly motivated and busy learners. Enhanced treatment including use of games, simulations, and multimedia may work best for content that requires a higher degree of cognitive processing and analytical skills. In the real world, our proposed solutions mostly use an optimum combination of both. This increases effort to some extent but may lead to better transfer of training.

I would like to conclude by reiterating the importance of the first and last stages of the life cycle of most e-learning projects – taking into account the learner profile of the present project and analyzing learner feedback from similar projects.

Sometimes it’s as simple as paying attention to the basics!

Offshore E-Learning Development: A Buyer's Guide

via Learning Circuits:

TIS's Chetan Mahajan asks "Are all e-learning projects equally easy to execute offshore?" and goes on to discuss the important considerations for off-shoring e-Learning development.

Please click here to read the full article.  

Extreme Programming

There’s something about buzzwords that I find irresistible, though they often only attempt to make the mediocre seem extraordinary. But once in a while, they help you discover real gems—like Extreme Programming (or XProgramming or just XP), a rage in the late nineties that I chanced upon. Invented by Kent Beck, XP turns conventional software development methodology on its head. At the heart of XP, however, is a set of very basic concepts:

•  Keep it simple
  Simpler to say than to do, but XP manages it by never adding more functionality than is absolutely essential. Instead of using complex software tricks that save on hardware, XP uses simple software code that saves on human effort—the savings are well worth it.

• Go for Gold
   Make small releases rather than trying to go the whole hog. As every release is a complete product in itself, clients get a working product faster. Each subsequent release brings new features—as required—and improves on earlier features.

•  Takes two to tango
   Pair programming—or using two heads instead of one—seems like a ridiculous waste of time. But the productivity gains through design innovation, defect reduction, and rework minimization explain why XP is ultimately a lot more productive.

•  Test. Test. Test.
   Begin testing on day one—yes, that’s not a typo. This is what makes XP the most likely candidate to realize the software utopia of Zero-Defect Programs.

•  Expect the unexpected
   Your cheese will move—and your software design will change. As Beck explains in his new book, XP is designed to accommodate change—heck, XP welcomes change.

XP is more than yet another lightweight methodology. It’s a way of looking at software development as a living organism that is continuously changing to adapt to market dynamics. Looking at our own TIS Demo Zone, it seems like a lot of what we did was XP, though not all of it was intentional. As we learnt during the development, there are no limits to customers’ demands—and no limits to XP’s capacity to meet them. And that is what XP is really all about.

The author is Manager – Content at Tata Interactive Systems. A graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology – he can resist anything except a good programming challenge.

On Prototypes

Seth Godin makes an interesting point in “The problem with prototypes”, when he says “your prototype has to be better than the finished product is going to be.” This is something we come across quite often in our work, when we send in proposals and do a “quick” prototype of the final solution. And we seem to make exactly the same assumptions that Seth suggests we should not. “This is just the concept, so a quick scribble is enough.” “Let’s do some rough designs; we can refine them later.” May be that’s not such a smart idea after all. A good idea badly represented may not be too different from a bad idea.

Of course, it’s tempting to argue that one may not have the time and resources to do a “better than final” prototype. But then, may be that’s a question of scope. May be we should pick up a smaller unit of learning and prototype it better.

As I write this, it strikes me that in advertising, the layouts and designs we make for business pitches are probably far superior to what finally comes out in the media.

Tailpiece: Quite often, the advertisements for a product are better than the product itself; so, if we go by Seth’s views, is the advertisement a prototype for the real product?

(Geetha Krishnan heads Instructional Design at Tata Interactive Systems)