"Your Call" Anti-Discrimination
Training 

Organization: Cascade State Bank (CSB) - The eLearning Designer's Academy Design Challenge

The Problem

An HR manager learned that the company’s eLearning authoring tool could now use AI to build a full company-wide course. He had no instructional design background, but he fed it the employee handbook and a set of company policies and produced the company’s new annual anti-discrimination training.

View the original AI-generated course here.

The result was generic content that didn’t reflect what learners actually needed. The knowledge check, interactions, menus, and AI-generated images made the course harder to access and the content harder to apply. Staff were left wondering why they had just clicked through screen after screen of policy and legal language.

Organizations do need employees to understand and follow these requirements. But compliance courses often focus on delivering information rather than on helping people remember it, apply it, and perform. To close the gap between stating expectations and actually changing behavior, compliance training has to be designed for performance. Generating a course is not the same as designing a learning experience.

The Solution

I redesigned the course to follow a new CSB manager through her workday, guided by these principles:

Performance-based design: Instead of just presenting information, I focused on what learners need to recognize, decide, say, or do when they encounter discrimination or inappropriate behavior at work.

Applying expectations, not reciting them: Learners make realistic decisions and respond to situations, putting expectations into practice instead of repeating rules and legal terms.

Intentional content selection: I included only what employees actually need, rather than pulling in policies and handbook content just because they were available.

Meaningful assessment: Learners show they can apply what they’ve learned in realistic scenarios, not just recall isolated facts.

A cohesive learning experience: The content, activities, interactions, and assessment are designed to work together toward the workplace performance the course is meant to build.