Designing training for difficult topics: Part 1

Scripting modules for unpleasant subjects 

So, my current project is quite a challenging one

I'm currently working with The Code, a non profit organisation who are working to protect children around the world from Child Sex Tourism, on several technology and learning projects.




One of these projects is a training piece for Travellers and Tourists that we plan to add to our website later in the year.

We are currently pulling together a script for an e-learning module for travellers which, we hope will seek to educate them about the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC), the causes and consequences, and be a responsible traveller whilst they are on vacation.

As a responsible traveller we would ask them to observe and take action if they any instances of child sex tourism whilst in their destination country as well as obviously not getting involved themselves.

Our desired behavioural change from this module would be that the person would be more likely to report an issue to the authorities if they observed it in the destination country. Additionally, we hope that the information we give them may also reduce the chance of them getting involved.

We've also identified several questions that we'd ideally like to answer with this training initiative

1. How do we target training to this audience that raises their awareness of child sex tourism in an engaging way?
2. What idea or theme could be incorporated into the design of the training that encourages people to repeat/discuss/share the training with others?
3. How do we focus the training to minimise the training time required without diluting the message?
4. How do we encourage people to share/socialise/discuss the training, and The Code’s work with others (giving it the viral factor)?
5. What can we do to maximise the chance that this training stands the best chance of changing the user’s behaviour/attitude? 

We're currently gathering together the material we'd like to cover in the module and we've decided that it needs to be short, sharp, and focused. 

However, we are still debating the best approach to get people talking about this issue and signing up for our training voluntarily given the sensitivity of the subject.

I'll post more updates on the project as we go, but if anyone has any approaches that we could use to make this training as engaging as possible please leave a comment.

Thanks for reading...