After meeting with our Corporate Compliance Officer, Dave, I stopped at the cubicle of my fellow e-Learning developer, Jerry.
“Hey, Mike, what’s up? You look like you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
“Does it show?” I said. “Dave wants me to create an online course for this year’s annual compliance refresher training.”
“Yeah…?” said Jerry. “That’s what we do for a living, Mike. What’s so hard about that?”
“He wants me to make it more engaging and fun than last year’s. I’d like that too. But with a subject like compliance? I’ve tried, and always seem to end up back in presentation mode, you know?”
Jerry grinned, a hint of pride in his eyes. “You did it with the sexual harassment course – remember? How’d you do it that time, Mike?”
“But he also wants the course to increase employees’ willingness to use the disclosure program,” I said. “So they’ll report suspected infractions, even their own honest mistakes.”
“Didn’t the sexual harassment course do that?” said Jerry. “Increase employees’ willingness to speak up, I mean? In fact, didn’t our HR Director feel the course nipped some harassment in the bud by increasing people’s awareness of certain forms of harassing behavior? I remember that course was a real pleasure to take. It seemed more like a story than a course. I didn’t even realize I was getting content; I just wanted to see how each scenario played out. How’d you do that, Mike?”
Is there a secret?
“Yeah,” I said. “We all know that scenarios and stories are good teaching tools. I enjoyed writing that course. And it helped me find a secret ingredient that I don’t see addressed much.” I began to feel the weight lift a little.
“Secret ingredient?” said Jerry. “I don’t remember you saying anything about a secret ingredient.”
“Hmmm,” I said. “I meant to share some lessons learned with the rest of our team. Guess I got wrapped up in the next project and … well, you know how that goes.”
“Sure do,” said Jerry. “Hey, you ought to give the whole team a workshop. How about trying it out on me first? I’m working on a customer service course I’d like to jazz up. Think your secret ingredient could help me do that?”
“Maybe. It’s not a panacea, but for certain types of courses I think it helps a lot. And it doesn’t have to be a whole course. It can apply to a one-paragraph scenario, too.”
“Such as?” said Jerry.
“Such as courses where you want to influence behavior – or attitudes, which show up as behavior. But to teach someone how to do a pivot table in Excel, just a simple, direct ‘here’s how’ is what people want.”
“So, back to what you said about hoping people will use the disclosure program, that’s a behavior, right?” said Jerry.
“Right,” I said, “and that could even be a Level 3 objective that we could measure.” (Editor’s Note: “Level 3” refers to Donald Kirkpatrick’s levels of training program evaluation. See “A.D.D.I.E. Meets the Kirkpatrick Four: A 3-Act Play,” by Tita Theodora Beal, published March 26, 2007 in Learning Solutions.)
“Very cool.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “Give me a few days to get my thoughts organized on paper, and then I’ll run them by you over lunch.”
Mealtime methodology
Later that week Jerry and I met for lunch in the cafeteria. In the meantime I had organized my thoughts into a semblance of a methodology that could maybe be helpful to others. I was eager to test them out on Jerry.
“So, what’s this secret ingredient?” said Jerry.
“Well,” I said, “It’s a set of principles for writing good fiction that I learned while working on my novel.”
“You’re writing a novel?” Jerry exclaimed.
“Yes, but that’s another story.”
We both recognized the pun about the same time. “Oh, that’s bad,” said Jerry.
Then I described my newfound methodology.
I told Jerry that what began as a desire to simply make training more interesting and engaging through scenarios ended up helping the training be more efficient, too. That is, you can use some devices from fiction to grab and hold the learner’s attention, and then deliver a lot of the content by way of feedback. Sort of like how back-story is used to fill in details about the past.
“Back-story?” said Jerry.
Modern fiction principles and instructional design
“Yes,” I said. “That was one of my first revelations. Actually, there are several principles of modern fiction-writing that all come into play together.
First you have to grab the reader’s attention – or the learner’s, for us. The key to fiction is conflict. As the author you give the reader something to worry about right up front; then you put one obstacle after another in the main character’s path until the end of the story, when the conflict is finally resolved.
Now, we’re not talking about novels for training, but that principle still applies. You see it used every night on the evening news: ‘Will it rain tomorrow? We’ll answer that question in a few minutes, but first, these stories.’”
“So how’d you do that in the sexual harassment course?” said Jerry.
“I’ll explain that in a few minutes,” I said.
“Hey! You’re doing it to me now!” said Jerry.
I smiled. “So, you want to keep listening, eh? See how effective it is?”
“How’d you learn this stuff, anyway, Mike?”
“As an aspiring novelist I studied a lot of authors’ writing styles and read many articles and books on the subject. Then when I began work on the sexual harassment course I saw how some of the principles I was learning could enhance my instruction. Both classroom and online, I think, but certainly online instruction.”
How it’s done — struggle
“Let me show you some of those principles,” I said.
I talked about figuring out the main character, the storyline, and the main character’s fundamental struggle – what you’ll get the reader worrying about. Being new to novel writing, I imagine these come into focus for authors in different ways. For my novel, I had identified the main character and storyline long before I could figure out a compelling enough struggle to keep the reader turning pages. For the sexual harassment course, the struggles came rather easily. I met with some HR counselors and identified the range of situations we wanted to cover. What was harder was figuring out the story line.
Invent a story line
I explained how I came up with the story line, how I held some brainstorming sessions and leafed through other training material. Then one night it hit me: the story line would be a newspaper columnist who answers mail about harassment issues once a week. I would name the columnist “Dr. Couth.” Her very name suggested both the context and tone of the course – a tad light-hearted with its focus on doing things ethically.
Jerry piped up. “It’s been two years since I took that course and I still remember her,” he said. “I also remember she came on the scene very early in the course – and started answering letters right away.”
Begin at the end
“Yes,” I said, “That’s another principle. Novels of yesteryear may have started at the beginning and rolled out the story in a very linear fashion, but not modern fiction. The rule of thumb is to start as close to the end as you can, chronologically speaking, and use flashbacks and other devices to fill in the back story.”
“There’s that term again,” said Jerry, “back story.”
“Right,” I said. “Take the classic American novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, for example. The story opens with the trial getting under way, and then fills in the action that happened before the trial as the story unfolds. The back story comes to us via witnesses’ testimony and flashbacks.”
I showed Jerry how my use of Dr. Couth and her weekly column enabled me to start near the end in my course. The course opens with Dr. Couth explaining her task of answering this week’s mail and asking our help, as the learner, in crafting her answers. She goes through a series of nine letters, each one describing a situation that had obviously happened before the “story” opened.
“Yeah,” said Jerry. “Dr. Couth answered one letter after another ‘til all nine were done, and so was the course. Now I see how the letters were, in effect, back-story. They enabled you to open the story near the end – when Dr. Couth sits down to answer this week’s mail – even though all the incidents naturally happened prior to that. It seemed more like a story than a course.”
Put the answers in the questions
“Good,” I said, “it was supposed to! Do you remember how you got the actual content?”
“No…,” said Jerry. Then his eyes lit up and said, “Wait, it was in the questions. Answers to the questions, to be more precise. Hey, that was pretty sneaky.”
“It took me quite awhile to come up with the question scheme,” I said. “They were really the result of a major strategic decision. Let me explain.”
Put the learner in the picture
I recounted for Jerry the process I went through in developing the course. How I first met with Mary, our HR Director, and viewed several third-party courses on the market. But none of them was as concise as we wanted, and they all seemed to take a legalistic approach to workplace harassment, sort of what you’d expect in off-the-shelf courses. But we wanted ours to integrate with some key elements of our culture, so Mary and I agreed I would develop the course internally.
Then Mary and I met with her HR counselors. Because there had been virtually no prior harassment complaints, we first identified some of the content associated with employment law and the company’s anti-harassment policy. Then we identified our most prevalent jobs and some plausible harassing behavior one might encounter in those jobs and locations. We ended up with nine situations addressing such topics as objectionable material on display in a cubicle, boss-to-employee harassment, and even harassment from a customer to an employee. (One large set of our employees delivers equipment to the customer’s home.)
It’s all about the objectives
Throughout this process, we kept coming back to the learning objectives. Yes, we wanted to address certain specific types of harassing behavior. But we realized that one thing we did not want to focus on was legal interpretation of various situations.
“But isn’t that was harassment training is all about?” said Jerry.
“Maybe in some companies,” I said. “But in keeping with our first core ideology of ‘Always Do the Right Thing,’ we realized that the moment of truth in any potential harassment incident boils down to this: Is someone being made to feel uncomfortable? If they are, we want them to feel empowered to surface the issue while knowing 1) the company will respond properly and 2) the company will not tolerate retribution for speaking up.”
“Sounds good,” said Jerry. “So how’d you do that?”
“It goes back to that strategy I mentioned,” I said.
I told Jerry that we wrestled with how to emphasize that criterion of discomfort as being the pivotal event in defining harassment, for us. Then the HR counselors and I realized that by asking the same three questions for each letter, we would follow a pattern that would first reinforce that criterion of “discomfort,” then give us a vehicle to convey the content – policies, procedures, and laws that govern how such incidents should be addressed. So this pattern of three questions enables the learner to “help” Dr. Couth to answer her mail.
Sidebar 1 presents an example of this sequence using one letter:
1. We learn the writer’s dilemma. Each letter describes a situation where the writer ends by asking, “What should I do now?” To add interest, the writer of each letter reads it aloud. Learners heard a different voice for each letter. (We used employee volunteers for the audio, and of course, all names and incidents were fictitious.)
- For
each letter, the learner answers three multiple choice questions as a way
of “helping” Dr. Couth craft her
response.
- What is making the writer feel uncomfortable?
- What should the writer do now? (Or other person if the writer has already taken some action.)
- What can the writer expect to happen next (because of taking the correct action in the previous question)?
- Dr. Couth reads her reply.
Dear Dr. Couth –
I’m in a real bind. Twice my supervisor has asked me to go out with her after work. I’ve always been able to make excuses. Yesterday she said, “Harold, honey, I know you’re a single dad and all … third time’s the charm, and I do mean charm. Thursday we need to stay a little late to finish the Acme project, then let’s celebrate. Just the two of us. Know what I mean?”
Dr. Couth – I’m nervous. I have to keep my job. What should I do?
Signed: Harold in Hannibal
