Creating Interactive Learning Materials for Tax Education: A Conversation with Wendy Williams

Commlab Podcast with Wendy Williams

00:00:06
Hi there. Welcome to the e-learning Champions Pod. I'm Shalini, your host for today and I'm very excited to have with us Wendy Williams who is the Design and Development Lead for a tax company. She's been in this space for the last more than 20 years. So, a very warm welcome to Wendy.

00:00:29
Thank you. Nice to be here, appreciate that.

00:00:33 Speaker 1
I'd like to throw open this session by asking you to share a little bit about your journey.

00:00:40 Speaker 2
Well. It started so many moons ago with my first Commodore computer, where we learned that computing was the wave of the future. Since then, I've come a long way. I've done Technical Support for upwards of 20 years. I owned a computer training facility where I taught people everything from Windows and financial software to how to communicate online and use social media marketing. So quite varied in that regard.

Once I left teaching, though, I went into doing Technical Support and managing my household, I raised my family. I took care of my handicapped husband. We did all of these things all at the same time. I became a virtual assistant, which for me was an incredible experience because it opened up the entire world to me. I did everything from bookkeeping to web design to social media marketing, you name it, I did it all.

And it gave me a really broad background to bring into the Technical Support and the tech design that I'm doing now. So, I'm the lead designer and technical writer for the tax education department. We teach about 15,000 people a year how to do taxes. And I design the tax portion of the educational materials.

00:02:22
Fantastic. I mean, for somebody who's challenged when it comes to have anything to do with taxes, it sounds phenomenal.

00:02:37
Yes. I don't do taxes.

00:02:40 Speaker 1
Yeah, but you train professionals.

00:02:43 Speaker 2
Yeah, but it's a lot of fun and I'm learning a lot about taxes, whether I wanted to or not.

Speaker 1

Sounds great. Once again, a very warm welcome to you, Wendy, and to all our listeners.

So let me dive right into the first question for today. What challenges do you face in implementing learning and development programs in tax education, and how do you overcome them?

00:03:07
Well, basically, there's two major challenges. The first is the same one we all have, budget.

And the second one, I imagine we all have as well, as the aversion to change.

As far as the budget goes, between staffing and tools and all the things necessary to generate online or even print materials, it can be very daunting and a little bit scary. We are all across the board in every industry, I believe challenged with doing twice the work with half the resources and half the time.

As technology goes, the world thinks that we should be able to just snap our fingers and things are done. It doesn't always work that way, but that's the goal. So, we're always looking for new and exciting ways to bring technology in to combat that issue. We try to compare the cost of how we do it now, staff material time all of that, and compare it to how much does the technology actually cost. Because a lot of times the big sticker price is really scary and you look at it and go, oh, that's not in our budget. We can't afford that.

But then if you say, well, we paid this and it saves us this much in staff and this much in time and this much in everything else, the two tend to more balance out.

So, if we can bring that cost close and save lots of time, sometimes it's worth it to pay a little bit more to save the time and be able to get three times more work done.

So, we try to weigh those things together and come up with a happy medium that allows us to use technology, but not exclusively, because certainly we still have to do a lot of it ourselves.

Once we get that, we say, OK, this is great. We can save all this money, and we can save all this time. Let's do this.

Then we have to decide if we can get our staff to buy into it. I know that's common, being a teacher as a virtual assistant for all those years, it's hard sometimes to bring people kicking and screaming into the new century.

So, we have to make it as simple as possible. We have to utilize all the available training opportunities for us too. So not only are we creating the training, but we're using the technology trainers, we're using our in-staff people to create training for our staff so that they can come on board and then hopefully between those two things, we can then embrace some of the wonderful new technologies that are available to us.

00:06:22
Thank you. Wendy, I think you've summed up the main challenges that are across the domain regardless of the industry. One is from the resistance to change the adoption of new technologies, especially when budgets kick in. Talking about technologies and digital learning, one thing is for certain, digital learning is here to stay. So, what are your views on areas where it is particularly impactful and areas where you feel it's not really suitable?

00:06:56
I love that question because we're in an industry that has a lot of very specific compliance, a lot like a healthcare industry might have. The IRS has said to us you can do these things and only these things and you can't do anything else. And because we provide training to people who are going to do tax returns, they have to be able to qualify and they have to be able to earn their credits and they have to have continuing education, which we provide. So, to do that, we have to really toe the line and make sure that we are staying in compliance with the regulations in addition to the fact that those laws and rules and regulations change every single year.

So, we can't create it and they will come. We have to create it, then we have to change it and then we have to change it again.

And we have to do that every single year, no matter what, because it changes every year. So that gives us a lot to be concerned about. The IRS has come out very clearly and said you cannot use AI to create courses. People have to create the courses.

00:08:11
OK, so that's a stated policy.

00:08:13
That is an absolutely hard and fast rule, so we have to now go at it from a different direction. We can use AI to do things like creating an outline, maybe even giving us talking points. We can use it to evaluate things that we've done. But in the end, our subject matter experts have to write the material.

So now comes the challenge. If they have to write it anyway, what can we do to simplify that for them? The outlines are one way. Another way is we are using AI to do things like create the exams.

They wrote the material, but now we feed that material into the AI and say I need this many questions. They need to be in multiple choice. They have to have 4 answer choices and give it all the parameters and it can spit out the test for us. So, something that took them hours or days to do in the past, I can now do in under 10 minutes.

00:09:27
Wow, that's the power of AI. So, when you say AI, are you referring to the Gen AI tools against which there’s a very strict ‘no use’ policy?

00:09:38
Yes, the writing tools. So Gen AI that would write material, we can use AI for voice which we do, we can use AI for graphics which we also do. But it's the text and I think it's because of the nature of the law and the fact that as we all know, AI can make stuff up.

00:10:03
Right, right. So because you have enterprise versions, licensed versions of these Gen AI tools too? Is there something like that in-house?

00:10:15
Yes.

00:10:16
OK, Despite that, you're taking every precaution not exposed.

00:10:16 Speaker 2

Yeah, and our legal department had to talk with them and negotiate with them and redo user agreements and privacy agreements and everything else before we could even think about using it because the compliance is so intense. But they've done that and currently we are using Copilot for most of our Gen AI.

We have a couple of different options for voiceover. We have a subscription to Merc AI which we may or may not be keeping because we use Articulate and Storyline for the majority of our design and they have some really dynamic voiceover options now as well.

So, it's possible that we're going to migrate into using their tools, since we already have it. Didn't save that money, so we couldn't get something else, because you know, it's all about the budget, right?

We're doing quizzes. That's the biggest thing we're doing with it right now. Being able to do a quiz. If you're not doing it yet, you should be. You take the material, you plug it into the AI, and you give it your parameters and it spits out a test just like that.

00:11:49
Yes, yes, we've done it. We've been one of the earliest adopters of these Gen AI tools at CommLab India. It's like magic. Of course, it does need the human to validate the output because as you said, AI is not infallible, and it does require the instructional design aspect to be very strong before you can call it a robust course or robust training materials.

00:12:13 Speaker 2
In addition to that though, one of my favorite things about AI at this point is the ability to create custom graphics. There are lots of ways to do that. You can do little cartoons or illustrations or whatever, but for us, one of the greatest tools that it's given us is the ability to do photographic work that is original. Because we're doing taxes and because we're dealing in that environment, a lot of times our scenarios are very, very specific. So, our SMEs will come up with a statement that says, we're working on the child tax credit, for example. So, we have a married couple, we have a 2-year-old child and we have a 10-year old child. One's a boy and one's a girl.

Well, go look at your clip art and your stock photos and try and find that exact image. And don't forget their grandma lives with them.

OK, so it becomes very complicated trying to find and you spend hours and hours and days trying to find an image that represents what they're trying to portray. Now I can use a Gen. AI and tell it this is exactly what I need. And it will do it for me and if I can't figure out how to do it, I go over to the Gen AI and I tell it this is what I need, write me a prompt for it and then it creates the prompt that I can put in my image creator. And I get it's this beautiful image as a result.

00:13:56
Wow, that's really interesting. That's a very innovative technique of using Gen AI to draft your prompts.

00:14:02
I'm using my Gen AI to create my prompts. It's awesome. It's so much better than I will ever be.

00:14:10
Right, right. It's really become such a fun thing now to be able to leverage one AI to give us input to feed into the other AI tool. I've been using this too and it's great.

00:14:21
Exactly. And then finally, like I said, we do bring in the voice AI. So where in the past we had staff members spending hours and days recording our book, our online courses have 25 chapters. It's like a 40 some hour course, something like that. And having somebody do voiceover for all of that took an enormous amount of time. Being able to do it in an AI generator and just dump the text in it and do a little tweaking and throw it in, and updating it next year because this sentence changed up here, and this sentence down here changed and not have to rerecord the whole thing is a miracle.

00:15:08
Right. Wow. So, a 40-hour training program. I think that that's really intense, the learner experience. And I can see how using all these can really make it come alive, make it engaging.

00:15:23
Yeah. Well, and that's the hard part because it's a lot to keep engaged and it's a very technical topic. So, keeping them engaged instead of nodding off while you're talking about laws and rules and guidelines is a challenge for sure, but this has really given us some choices.

00:15:46
So, Wendy, you have these very lengthy course materials stretching to 40 hours and you have been using AI to make it come alive in terms of the visuals and in terms of the outlines and the assessments. So how else is AI reshaping tax education in terms of other interactive elements? Do you have any examples you could share of tools that have made a significant impact?

00:16:20
Sure. As I mentioned earlier, we use Merc and we used Storyline for our audio which has been amazing, and it's hard to tell the difference these days. Voice has come so far that it doesn't sound like a computer anymore. It's still struggles over a few words, but for the most part it's very conversational and very easy to work with.

So that's voice. We use Adobe InDesign when working with our print material. They have built in AI as well now. So, we're able to use that to help bring in interactivity into our printed book, which sounds crazy because obviously a printed book is on a page. But we take that printed book and we put it into a digital online version.

And that's where our interactivity comes in. You can print it, and you can look at and you can read it, but you can also use it online and then you can it ask you questions. And the questions you click, and you get answers, it will enlarge your images. It will do all of these different things that you can't get from a regular printed material. So that's been a big addition. In the last two to three years, we've really been leaning into that digital aspect of the material so that we can bring that engagement into the dry reading that comes with a printed book. We have the enterprise version of Copilot. We also use Firefly for image creation as well. We have Canva. We use Firefly. We use Dall-E, we use Copilot, and we get images from all of those places. That's kind of it.

00:18:23
Yeah, what about feedback? Since you put this book online and you incorporate all these interactivities and probably simulations, you can even embed them. What about feedback to learners? Because once again, there's a danger of it becoming a somewhat passive reading experience.

00:18:35
Correct. And I'll be honest because it was just a book for all those years, and it wasn't online, it was very passive. I don't know that we've gotten any negative feedback from the digital book. Everybody who uses it loves it. Not everybody uses it because some people will never give up their book, never, never. I used to be that way. No, Kindle, no, I'm not going to do that, no way. I got to have my book in my hand. Then I found out my Kindle was waterproof. So now I can go to the beach, and I can go to the pool and so I'm sold, but it takes more than that to sell some people. But those who use the digital book love it. They love the interactivity of it. For example, in the past we would have an example, and that example would give you all the information. This person made this much money, they have this many children, they are head of household, and they are blah blah blah. So, they can claim the child tax deduction, right? But we didn't want to do that. We wanted to give them all that information and then say, can they claim the child tax credit? Now we can do that because they have to Click to see the answer.

So, we can lay it all out and it's not a knowledge check per se, but it's an example. Here's an example of a real live everyday situation, what do you think? And then we give them the opportunity to think about it before we just tell them what the answer is.

So, they've really embraced that. They really like being able to just click on an image and enlarge it as opposed to scrolling and resizing your screen and all of that is something else that they really enjoy. So we're taking baby steps and we're bringing it in a little bit at a time because it still has to match the printed book. It's not just an online product. It's not just a digital product. They have to be able to look at the screen and look at the book and know that it's exactly the same thing. So that does make it challenging, what we can bring into it. But the things that we have brought in they like.

00:21:06
So I think this book that you talked about, the digital version as well as the print version, is that the flagship product that you had to design and develop?

00:21:17
It is, we have. It has two facets. It has the printed book, which is also digital, but then it has online modules that you can take as a self-study. So, It's two pieces of the same puzzle, they match.

00:21:30
So right, I think you have shared a little bit of the journey, the transition from the print to the digital and the challenges you faced. It's very heartening to know that it was well received, both versions are well received. Now that's quite an achievement.

00:21:32
And then the whole online product is totally different, that's a whole separate piece. We do each chapter as an individual module. And that is entirely online, and it is entirely self-driven. So, they can take that instead. The book and digital version of the book are generally for traditional classrooms. They have an instructor, the instructor has either the online or a PowerPoint to lead the course, and they have the book to support them.

The other option is to take it as a self-study and then each chapter has its own online module that is completely self-study. You go in, you read it, it talks to you, it does the AI voice for you. It has a lot of interactivities. Click this button to see this example. Click that button to follow through. The whole process.

This here's a knowledge check which gives you immediate feedback. Here's the end of course. Assessment that will grade you and send off your scores. So. it's a whole different animal.

00:22:58
Right. So curious, Wendy, this the self-study component, is that also 40 hours?

00:23:06
Yes.

00:23:08
And how do you generally space it?

00:23:13
It's by chapter, and each chapter can be anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour to a couple of hours for something that's more complex. Because it's 25 chapters, you break that out and it works out to be about 40 hours.

But we'll have anywhere from, say 75 slides to 180 slides. Just depends. Some topics are much more complicated than others. And that would include the exams and everything. So, there's a lot to maintain on an annual basis and update every single year.

Three years ago, we decided to completely redesign our online product. So, we created brand new templates, a whole new look and feel. We got rid of a lot of the old standard cartoony graphic kind of stuff and solid colors, and moved into comfortable photographic images that portray what we're talking about. Sometimes it's the background of the entire slide with moving parts that come up on top of it, explaining what you're looking at, things like that.

We have a lot of forms though. We have a lot of forms, so a lot of times it's text and form and here's what goes on this form. And here's circling things and movement that draws your eye to where you're putting information, things like that to keep people engaged.

Sometimes if it's a complicated process, we're going to claim the child tax credit, there's like 10 steps involved in that. So, here's the form. You fill this out and then you take this information, and you put it on that form and then you take this information and then you move on to that form.

And then we'll have scenario not scenarios, but.

00:25:19 Speaker 1
Simulations maybe.

00:25:22 Speaker 2
We do simulation practices, but this is more like a step by step. Where you go. You click this button, and you see this whole interaction and then it moves you to the next screen which shows you the next interaction. So, it's a more step process through the whole thing.

At the end of each chapter, though, at least the first mandatory chapters. Some of them are optional, but the first 10 chapters are really the core. So, several of those have interactive simulations where the software is actually in the background, and we ask you a question and you have to fill in the form yourself, as you would in the software. So that's brand new also in the last few years.

00:26:14
I'm sure that's been highly effective.

00:26:17
It is. Everybody loves them. When you get into that technical amount of interactivity, there's often a few glitches here and there, but they're minor. And for the most part, people are going, this is so great, we never got to use the software. For it was always print out the forms and fill out the forms, but that didn't teach them how to use the software.

00:26:40 Speaker 1
Right. And it's a risk-free environment. So that takes all the pressure off in fully exploring.

00:26:46 Speaker 2
Exactly. And so that's been amazing. So that's kind of what we've been up to the last few years, just bringing more hands-on activity to both processes.

00:27:02
Right. So, when learners take these online courses, the modules, are they expected to do it in one stretch?

00:27:15
OK, you have to have it done to get the credit in time to do your tax returns. And usually, you start the class, then you have a month or two to do it or whatever, a few weeks. But you can't just do part of it and then come back and do it three months from now. You have to have it done in order to qualify to do tax returns. So, you do it on your own time you can do an hour at a time here in an hour and a time there, but you do have to complete the course.

00:27:56
And these credits have to be renewed every year because, as you said, changing tax rules and so on, at least the 1st 10.

Speaker 2

Not the 40-hour course. OK, so when you start, you take the 1st 10 courses, which is probably 15 hours, and that's what you have to do to become qualified with us and with the IRS, with us mostly and then the rest of it is as needed and as you want. So, it's more detailed information on specific, more advanced topics above and beyond the basics. OK, it's still part of the overall umbrella of fundamentals. It's the more advanced part. You do that the first year. And sometimes you do it the second year too, because it's a lot of information to absorb it one time. And once you've done it for a year, it helps to go back and review it and go, oh, I didn't catch that last year, right? But after that, we have continuing education courses. And we have probably a 100 of those. We don't update them all every year, thank God we never could. But we do probably update 5 or 6 or 7 a year. So, we spent about six months doing the book and the online courses that go with it and then we spend the other six months doing these continuing education courses, so they stay as current as possible and give people the information they need.

And we have little spotlights which are little hour courses that you can take just to refresh on or dig deep into one specific little thing.

00:29:41
Right, right, I was wondering about that. You know what? If somebody needed to revisit something or go slightly deeper into one area where they feel they're not confident enough. So, there you have your solution.

00:29:55 Speaker 2
Well, like for example, maybe you're just trying to figure out how to do a 1099 k, which is the new thing for gig workers that they're doing that's brand new and there's a whole lot of rules around it. So yes, it's part of the main course, but it's just touched on, yes, it's here. But we have a spotlight. It's an hour course that does nothing but talk about that. So, they can go in and they can say, OK, I'm doing a 1099 K This is what I need to know. I'm doing income forms for my 1090 nines. This is what I need to know. I am doing virtual currency. This is what I need to know. So those we update annually.

00:30:41
So, I think going by what you've shared so far, you and your team must be constantly on your toes meeting the learning needs of the organization.

00:30:48 Speaker 2
Always. It used to be that we had an offseason and in-season, but not anymore.

00:30:55 Speaker 1
Right, right. So, Wendy, you mentioned when you shared a little bit about your journey that you also had a background in technical writing. You have a very unique hybrid role really, both as a technical writer and a design lead. So how do you balance these responsibilities and what are the advantages that this dual role brings to your projects?

00:31:21 Speaker 2
Yeah, well, I actually love doing both, so that's a plus. But usually when we start on this journey for the book every year, we start with the tech writing. And that is the hardbound printed book with the digital version, and I design it. But even more than that is I just have to make sure that the information is being presented in a palatable way. So, we design it so that it looks good, and it flows well and it's comfortable for people to interact with. But then we also have to look at it from a technical aspect, taxes are technical.

And our SMEs, bless their heart, are technical because they have to be, that's their job. But then I have to look at it and say, OK, does it have to be that technical?

Is it necessary to speak up here? When we can say the same thing down here and make it more accessible and more understandable, because sometimes if you've ever read a law, you can't understand them. They just don't make sense unless you're a lawyer.

So, it helps to bring it a little bit more palatable, make it a little bit more accessible and put it into a language that people can understand. And we do a lot of that.

It lets me work with the SMEs a lot, where I'll go and say, OK, I just read this six times, and I have no idea what it means. Can you help me? And then they explain it to me.

And I go, oh, that makes sense. Can we say it like this instead, because now I understand it.

So that's a lot of fun, to be able to work with them and massage it in a way that is awesome instead of just putting it out there.

Once we get that where we want it, then we go to the online course we say, OK, it's done. We know what the book is going to look like. We know the material that we're presenting. We know what we want them to learn. Now let's turn that into slides.

And so, we take it, and we go through the same material, but now we're rewriting it a little bit. The notes are going to be right out of the book, but the slides have to be different because we can't put all that text on the slide. We have to learn how to present it graphically.

So now we're taking the information that we've already worked on and learned, and adapting it in a new way. And having worked on it so intently to begin with makes that a little bit easier because I'm more familiar with the material.

00:34:18
Right, and I think that is probably the most effort intensive part to get those inputs from the SME and tweak them in a language the learner understands, simplify complex features.

00:34:37 Speaker 2
It is, but when you move to the online you have that same process all over again, because now you're condensing it into a slide, but you don't want to lose what's important. So now I'm taking all their words that are awesome and great and very explanatory, and I have to make them make sense in 20 words or less on a slide. As an example, I use AI to do that sometimes. Say there's a complex topic and it's 4 paragraphs and I need it to go on a slide. Tell me what to do. If I need to use two slides, I'll use two slides, but tell me how to break that down and suggest the images that are going to go with it so that I can get that point across in a meaningful way.

00:35:28
Thanks, Wendy. That gives us a glimpse into what goes on in the background of creating learning materials in the domain of tax education.

And I think it's really worked out very well for you to have this technical writing background and bring it together with the instructional design that goes into all of this. I'm sure your learners are greatly benefited by this.

00:36:00
It's really intense, but I think that's what I love about it the most. I love the challenge, and I love the opportunity. And I love the satisfaction of knowing that somebody got something out of what I put out there, that somebody actually learned something and was able to make a career from the training material that I created, it's so fulfilling.

00:36:29
Absolutely. And especially given how tough this particular domain is, at least a person like me, it literally is rocket science. But when you have fantastic instructional designers working on the materials, I'm sure you're demystifying a lot of things and making it, as you said, highly accessible to learners.

So, thank you so much, Wendy, for those stories that you've shared and the glimpses you've given us into what it is to create, design, and develop materials for tax professionals. And thank you so much once again for accepting our invite. And thank you listeners. And do stay tuned in for our future our podcast sessions.