In corporate training, courses must educate learners on the necessary information for them to do their job. It sounds obvious, but for this to successfully occur, courses must be designed and created by people who know what the relevant information is that learners need to know. The process of ensuring that a course contains the relevant information is called Validation.

For most of eLearning’s history, validation occurred during the building of a course. The course would be built by a Subject Matter Expert (SME), someone who knew exactly what the relevant information was and could populate the course with it. Because the course was built from the ground up with this in mind, validation was assured and upon completion learners know the valid information to do their jobs.

AI, particularly generative AI, has now disrupted this integrated validation process. With the ability to use AI to generate a course in minutes or even seconds, the cost of building a course is dramatically decreased, but AI is not a SME. With access to enormous amounts of data, AI is an effective tool when learners know what they need to know – for example, if a learner is aware of an office policy’s existence but not the policy itself, they can ask AI what the policy is and then follow it in their work. However, if the same learner is unaware that this policy exists, AI will not help them as it operates on what is asked of it. AI is not a sentient being that can determine what staff must know. This example illustrates the pitfalls of using AI to generate a course. It will draw on information on the requested topic to construct the course, but that may not include all the necessary information, and it may contain irrelevant information. Unlike reaching the end of a SME-built course, in this case a learner is not guaranteed valid information when they complete the course.

As a result of this, at SkillGate we’ve developed the Validate-Ed concept. One dimension of this concept is the checking of courses by SMEs to ensure that they contain all the necessary relevant information, and irrelevant information is removed. This way, the course is validated, and learners receive valid knowledge from it for their work. The ease of generating a course using AI means that the number of courses readily available will likely increase exponentially, but at SkillGate we will retain full transparency over whether courses have been built by SMEs or AI, and if AI-generated courses have been checked by SMEs and to what extent.

The other dimension of Validate-Ed is concerned with an element exclusive to online training. By being online, training can become a continuous process, as evidenced by many organisations implementing training renewals on an annual basis. When training is continuous, validation must also be continuous, because there are situations where the relevant information changes over time. For example, if a relevant policy changes, the staff who completed the training before it was changed have training that is no longer valid. Validate-Ed is concerned with ensuring that in situations like this, staff’s training remains valid. This can be achieved by rolling out new courses every time a change is made, but this is an inelegant and imprecise solution when only one regulation of many may have changed.

To this end we have developed the ability to automatically send messages to all a course’s previous learners when that course is edited, updating them on what information has changed. This keeps their learning valid and can minimise the risk of errors occurring in the workplace without forcing staff to repeat large swathes of training before they are due for renewal.

As AI-generated courses become the norm rather than a minority, purposeful validation will only become more important. With the Validate-Ed concept in mind you can ensure that your workforce remains competent, armed with the relevant knowledge to operate effectively.