Challenge

The Ontario Securities Commission (Canada’s equivalent of the SEC) selected Learning Designs Online to help them develop a rigorous Quality Assurance strategy for the OSC website and educational materials. The OSC had committed to a new mandate for providing investors with accurate, easy-to-understand information. Consistent with new SEC securities policies, investor information must be free of financial jargon and legalese.

Learning Designs developed a Quality Assurance strategy for the Commission based upon focus group results and similar research conducted by the SEC.

Our solution was to develop plain writing standards—an assessment tool that will help ensure that all information presented to the investing public is clearly written and user-friendly. The new OSC clear writing standards can be used by OSC staff (who are not necessarily professional writers or editors) to evaluate the clarity of financial documents released by investment firm for the investing public.

Using LDO’s Quality Standards, Learning Designs preformed a quality audit of existing investor information on the OSC website. Following the audit, all information found to be inadequate was required to be rewritten to meet plain language standards.