REVIEW: KnowledgeCity Online Training – Human Trafficking Awareness (paid)

Summary

Cost: You must have a monthly subscription or your employer pays. I was unable to figure out how much taking this lone course would cost as an individual. Ultimately, we were instructed (by KnowledgeCity) to pay for a subscription (to review it) and just cancel the subscription before the end of the 30 days. 

Assessment-based Certificate: Yes. There is a 20 question quiz at the end you must pass with 80% proficiency. 

Interactivity: There is one question at the end of each chapter.

Duration: ~20 minutes.

Course description: Human trafficking is a worldwide problem. No country is immune from human trafficking. Human trafficking is modern day slavery. This course will help you understand what human trafficking is and what groups of individuals are vulnerable to trafficking. You will learn the differences between trafficking and smuggling along with how traffickers recruit and control their victims. You will also learn what California organizations must do to be in compliance with state laws.

Review: This is the basic human trafficking course that is, essentially, included in all the human trafficking videos from KnowledgeCity. Other KnowledgeCity courses reference this review for the basic chapters:

Welcome 1:20
Human Trafficking (set of videos, ends with one interactive question) 20:24
Child Trafficking (set of videos, ends with one interactive question) 10:25
Common Forms of Human Trafficking (set of videos, ends with one interactive question) 10:24
Traffickers (set of videos, ends with one interactive question) 7:06

Good stuff: Materials are good and provide a good look at trafficking from a worldwide perspective. This is used inside their California, Hospitality, and California Hospitality courses (all reviewed here), and honestly, it's just too much to think anyone would want to get through. 

TRIGGER WARNING: Violence and abuse (skip to language support – I think the video is safe, too).

The rest: The “look and feel” of the videos was unsettling at best and triggering at worst. They use images of children bound with rope and the like were FAR beyond anything our advisors / survivors I have spoken with would EVER approve. Too much pain. I think there's not a lot of need to show that, so I have to call it out. 

The course has a LOT of “facts” that it throws at you as bullet points, and given their video editing FLASHes that are used constantly between these “bullet points,” there are times where I literally have to look away from the screen because I feel like it may give me a migraine or a seizure. 

It doesn't feel like there is a “story” or “flow” throughout. It's like they know they have a lot of facts to shove in your head and they just blast them at you. 

At the end of each chapter, there is a single question / puzzle to solve. Two of them are “fill in the blanks.” And WOW… trying to figure out a fill in the blank is NOT easy.

One of the answers even had at least one BLANK SPACE in the fill in the blank (see above – that's the one), AND I had to go back a couple of videos and read the transcription to locate the place that might have the answer. It was unbelievably frustrating. I mean, I know the material in the first place, I knew it while they were going over the part where the question was pulled from, and when the question popped up, I thought… surely I can get this… Yeah, I had to search for that answer for TEN MINUTES. Not very satisfying.

The final certificate test (20 questions) had some serious problems, too. They had questions where they wanted me to recall the EXACT percentages of some bizarre fact. I don't think it's too unrealistic if the numbers are something like 1%, 35%, 78%, 99%, but these were a bit precise. 

So, I didn't get a 100% the first time through. In fact, I failed. Which leads me to a good part of their course: the final exam pulls their 20 questions from a larger test bank. 

Even though there were questions that I didn't think quite balanced out (see above), I eventually passed. 

I am happy to see that there is another course with some interactive questions and an assessment-based certificate out there on the market. 

Final notes:

• Course is globally relevant (too much information for a hotel employee in Texas or California to need, for example)
• Only one question per chapter
• Final exam has bizarrely detailed number / stats questions that I cannot figure out why are so important to know
• Video editing used many FLASHES
• Graphics throughout video were triggering with violence and torture

The video below is a summary after I completed the class.

Language support: English / Spanish. Videos have subtitles. Interactive questions have translations into Spanish.

Additional Resources: There are no downloadable resources.

Link to course: Click here.