In the final installment in this series, we look at the E in ADDIE and discuss a less obvious, but effective, way to evaluate the effectiveness of your compliance training.

The last “E” in ADDIE, evaluation, is often the most overlooked. With so many demands on your time, it’s easy to feel that evaluation is a form of looking back, a luxury that you don’t have the time for. The truth is evaluation is all about the future and focusing on how to make your next training program more effective.

Most compliance training includes an assessment at the end that is meant to measure how well the learner achieved the objectives of the training. But as we know, measuring learning objectives immediately after training is completed is not a good indicator of how well the learner will transfer that training to their job. The forgetting curve slope can be fast and steep.

A better way to evaluate the effectiveness of a training program is to assess your learners a few weeks or even a few months after they have completed the training. But most learners view assessments with the same level of joy as a visit to the dentist, and not all assessments provide useful information. So how to assess learning without using an assessment? Play a game!

Recently, NXLevel worked with a client to evaluate the effectiveness of their annual compliance training by using the JEOPARDY! game from our suite of compliance training games.

JEOPARDY! is a proven and popular learning format employees are genuinely excited to play, and our version provides detailed reporting that allows you to drill down to see how employees responded to individual questions. It’s also the only licensed JEOPARDY! game on the market, so it features the same graphics, music, and gameplay as the television version.

Working with the client, we developed a series of role-specific JEOPARDY! games with questions that focused on critical topics pulled from their current compliance training. We configured each game so learners could play it on their own in about 10-15 minutes.

The client identified a representative subset of employees for each role and emailed each of them a link to their game.

No one was required to play, but employees could earn points towards their company’s rewards program for completing the game and more points for being high scorers. Through their company’s rewards program, employees redeem points for merchandise, gift cards, and other items.

The games were a big success! Employees appreciated that they  were short, fun, and engaging. More importantly, the client obtained valuable data on how employees responded to each question, and they are now using that data to help determine how to revise their compliance training. By looking at questions where employees scored well, where employees seemed to struggle, and which incorrect answers were chosen, the client has a clearer picture of their compliance learning needs. Such practices also align well with the DOJ’s increased emphasis on a data-driven approach to compliance.

And with that, we’ve returned to the first step in ADDIE, analysis. We’re ending this blog series on using the ADDIE model where we began, because learning never ends and each step in the ADDIE model informs and interacts with the others.

Thanks for reading. We hope you’ve found the entire series informative and helpful. As always, any and all feedback is welcome!