Company: Workplace Answers, Austin, TX
Company Description: Founded in 1997 on the idea that employees are any organization's most valuable resource, Workplace Answers is a risk management and HR compliance leader. Workplace Answers' holistic compliance training solution enables diverse organizations to promote fair and equitable workplaces, while protecting their bottom line. We have 31 employees have deployed hundreds of thousands of trainings globally.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Categories - Content
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Content - Legal Information Solution

Nomination Title: Workplace Answers' Student Empower Solution

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 650 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date:

National research indicates that female college students are at risk: somewhere between 20% and 25% of them are sexually assaulted during their time in college. This is unacceptable, and it has to stop—which is why federal laws and court decisions now mandate that higher education institutions train on sexual violence, harassment and discrimination prevention topics.

At Campus Answers, we have designed a higher education legal compliance program that not only meets but exceeds these legal requirements: the Student Empower Solution, a suite of fifteen online courses for students, faculty, staff, investigators and parents.

Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, the Violence Against Women Act, the Clery Act and shifting federal regulations and guidance coalesce to create a challenging, complex set of overlapping legal material. Since the law in these areas can change quickly, we keep our fingers on the pulse of legal decisions and developments. If an update is required, we can change all courses live immediately, so that Learners always have the most up-to-date legal content.

Our mobile-friendly legal information solution is delivered 100% online, and is available to Learners anytime, anywhere, on a range of devices. Online delivery avoids the old problem of having to cram lecture halls with thousands of students and employees. Instead, it allows for instantaneous deployment to all Learners through a simple online platform. Client administrators can track Learners’ training completions electronically, thus ensuring maximum legal compliance and peace of mind, should they be audited. Administrators can also view crucial analytics to help understand their return on investment (ROI) (e.g., comparing student knowledge before and after course completion, and survey results which display anonymous student-submitted behavioral data).

But legal information doesn’t have to be boring, so we focus on an innovative, media-rich delivery, which supports our evidence-based instructional design. Our Student Empower Solution includes professionally-produced video, custom animated stories, social media tie-ins and games that help Learners test their knowledge.

This functionality is bolstered by the instructional design methodology used in the Student Empower Solution. We dedicate special attention to bystander intervention, which teaches Learners how to step in (when it is safe to do so) if someone is in need of help. Simply put, bystander intervention empowers people to act.

Because we are teaching complex legal principles that the learner must be able to apply to unpredictable situations, we employ a story-based learning approach. We teach the law, then immediately put it into practice with stories and questions that expand the storyline and allow Learners to test their skills by applying the legal principles to real-world situations. Key courses include a policy acceptance page, which requires Learners to read their school’s policies and certify that they have been trained, and have read the legal specifics in their home state, which are covered in detail. The policy acceptance is tracked electronically for administrators, ensuring maximum compliance with the law.

To test the success of our compliance solution, we conducted two focus groups. Following the primary sexual violence prevention course for first-year students, Learners took a survey, and reported significant improvement in the following legally-required training areas: (1) awareness of sexual violence issues, (2) knowledge about how to respond and (3) impact on behavior. 100% of students showed some form of agreement that the course improved their awareness of intimate partner violence, stalking and the lasting effects of sexual violence on survivors. Our second focus group was given a pre-test and a post-test to measure the increase in knowledge of violence prevention. On the pre-test, students scored an average of 63% before the training (essentially a “D” average). But they improved their understanding of sexual violence prevention techniques extensively during the course, exiting the identical final test with an average score of 94% (an “A” average).

Our Student Empower Solution helps our clients successfully navigate complex legal information, so they can work to end sexual violence on college campuses.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) of the chief features and benefits of the nominated product or service:

•The Student Empower Solution meets and exceeds the legal requirements of Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, the Violence Against Women Act and the Clery Act.

•All of our legal information courses are functional on most devices, including Android tablets and iPads.

•Tracking, completion reports, test results and survey responses are available electronically to administrators.

•Online mobile delivery avoids revictimizing survivors of sexual violence by allowing them to take their training at the time and place they feel most comfortable.

•The solution focuses on teaching bystander intervention, today’s leading sexual violence prevention technique.

•The Student Empower Solution courses make legal information fun by engaging Learners with professionally-acted videos, age-appropriate animations, interactive elements and games.

•An empirical focus group revealed that the average test score went from a “D” average before the course to an “A” average after the course.