Crucial ChoicesTM – E4’s Interactive Learning Format for Ethics and Compliance Education
When I was a child, I used to love read and write adventure stories. I still do. One of my favorite kinds of stories allowed readers to choose their own path, sometimes succeeding in achieving a happy ending, but usually not. In this way, the reader could be an active participant in the unfolding story. In the United States, these gamebooks, written on science fiction or fantasy topics for young adults, are called Choose Your Own Adventure® (CYOA) novels. Written in the second person, the reader would take on the role of the protagonist in the book and direct the actions, decisions, and ending. Multiple endings and successful paths through the adventure were possible. After an opening scene, the reader would be asked to make a choice for the protagonist’s next action and turn to that page. Subsequent choices would also end in the same manner, with the reader making a choice and turning to a new page in the book.
A few years after I completed my doctoral degree in philosophy with a specialization in bioethics, I worked as a senior education advisor at a large pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) from 2003-2006. My job was to advise on and develop adult learning in topics related to ethics and compliance topics for GSK’s 15,000 R&D staff. One of the courses I helped develop consisted of using engaging and realistic (and frequently true) ethics cases wrapped around a Jeopardy®-type game format for our senior leadership teams. They truly enjoyed these live training sessions but it also became clear to me that their active participation and engagement had additional benefits. The training was more memorable than the typical online training modules that companies, including GSK, produce. Most of them suffer from what I call the “click-click-click-done” phenomenon. Such online modules can be cost effective, but merely taking policies and procedures, converting them to PowerPoint® slides, then producing them for online deployment has many shortcomings:
Learner boredom
Slides can be clicked through without ensuring comprehension of material and learners can multitask during training (e.g., use the phone, check email, surf the Internet, etc.), which reduces attention and retention.
Instruction typically involves memorization and regurgitation of facts rather than teaching people how to think through problems and reach resolutions that accord with ethical principles or organizational policies and procedures.
If standardized assessments are used, learners can obtain answers from others and falsely appear to have received, understood, and excelled at the ethics and compliance training.
In particular, since the goal of ethics and compliance training is to encourage ethical behaviors and personal and professional integrity in meeting legal and regulatory mandates, most online learning falls short.
When I couldn’t sleep one night in late 2006, I had an epiphany and jotted down the idea that would lead to the development of Crucial ChoicesTM, the learning format that combines engaging and realistic ethics scenarios with the CYOA format, and E4 (Eclipse Ethics Education Enterprises, LLC), the company that now develops, markets, and evaluates these products. Remembering with fondness the CYOA books, I wondered why not do online and live ethics and compliance education in which the learner chooses the path, trajectory, and outcome of the scenario and builds the learning into the scenario itself?
From that kernel, an entire crop of ideas has sprouted. Crucial ChoicesTM is easily adapted to the following markets:
Moreover, Crucial ChoicesTM is easily adapted to a spectrum of (non-)technological learning modalities, including:
One unique feature of Crucial ChoicesTM is not merely its ability to engage and entertain learners. Built into the technology is the ability to pre- and post-test learners and calculate whether a particular learning activity is effective at producing a desired ethics and compliance outcome, a change in behavior or attitude, or increase awareness of the topic at hand.
As a company, E4 is still in its infancy, but with the founder and current president’s passion for learning and education, and strong academic partners in multiple ethics environments, and a visionary eLearning developer (www.tipmedia.com), E4 hopes to revolutionize ethics and compliance training and to provide the public with engaging and entertaining opportunities to learn about topics in bioethics.
E4 President and Founder, David Perlman, Ph.D., welcomes feedback and for readers to explore E4’s website (www.e-four.org), which includes several text-based demos of ethics scenarios using the Crucial ChoicesTM learning format and marketing brochures for the above markets.
Legal Information
Trademarks: E4, Eclipse Ethics Education Enterprises, E4 Technologies, Crucial Choices, Bioethics 2.0, and the Eclipse logo are trademarks of E4.
Copyrights: The Crucial ChoicesTM learning format is a registered copyright by E4. All Rights Reserved. No part of the sequence, structure, or organization of the Crucial ChoicesTM learning format can be used without express consent of or via license from E4.
Patent: The Crucial ChoicesTM learning format is patent pending.