The analytics and reports of your learning management system are essential to the growth of your training organization.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
To the great benefit of training organizations, today’s learning management systems (LMS) have taken this business maxim to heart. By offering a powerful suite of analytics and reporting tools, your LMS empowers your leadership team with deep visibility into the performance of your online course offering. These insights support your efforts to continuously improve your business offer and grow.
Just how can your LMS’ analytics enhance your online learning program’s performance?
Remember, your modern LMS collects data on every click between a user and the system. This mountain of data is collected and sorted in easy-to-read reports and one-glance widgets that provide quick insight into how your learners and course catalog are doing.
To illustrate some of the insights you can gain, we’ll discuss five avenues of inquiry into your data that can help support and elevate the success of your training offer.
1. Find out where learners are succeeding and struggling, so you can provide support.
Let’s say some learners are taking longer than expected to complete a course. Through a progress report, you can observe who has finished the course, who is still studying, and which content elements your learners have completed.
As a result, your team can intervene in a timely way with learners to find out what obstacles they’re facing. This quick intervention minimizes learner disengagement and potentially offers you insight into your course design.
2. Learn about individual performance in order to personalize learning paths.
Just as a custom-tailored outfit will fit and feel better than an off-the-rack model, training materials that are customized to a learner’s needs will engage learners more.
Let’s say your learners are performing in widely diverging ways during a particular training. Because your analytics can provide detailed exam results on the responses of your learners, you can analyze these to understand better why some participants are where they are. You can suggest or provide additional training materials to specific learners based on the insight provided in the reports.
A learner who is performing better, and receiving adequate support will have a greater level of satisfaction, and is more likely to recommend your training to peers.
3. Collect data to improve course design for a better learner experience.
Naturally, you want to develop the most engaging and effective learner experience so you can grow your repeat and new customer business. Learning analytics enables you to understand learner behavior and detect patterns across different courses and contexts.
For example, your learning analytics may reveal that engagement in your guitar courses is higher with instructor X than with instructor Y. Or, your wine-tasting courses are much less popular in region A, where your home brewing course is skyrocketing. This data enables you to make the appropriate business decisions.
Online surveys can also provide qualitative and quantitative feedback on the learner experience. For instance, learners may inform you that they find the amount of live feedback to be insufficient. Immediately, your team can respond with adjustments to the curriculum that enhance engagement with your training.
4. Visualize data for an instant view of your learners’ performance.
Learning analytics offers you a range of options for viewing data about your training program ⎯⎯ from a bird’s-eye view to an in-the-weeds granularity.
For example, you can take a look at the widgets in your dashboard to inform you at a glance what the course completion rates are for a given training, group, or a business unit. At the same time, you can drill down into the data to see how one specific learner is doing. Furthermore, because these widgets access real-time data, they can show you year-over-year or month-over-month comparisons, so you can stay on top of your performance at any time.
Your LMS can also produce data visualizations and reports in standardized formats, with data you can export to a spreadsheet for further manipulation.These real-time reports can support your leadership team in making decisions.
Through these reports and widgets, for instance, you can answer questions such as: What is my best-selling training this month? Who are my top customers this year? Which trainer is generating the most sales? Which trainings are most often added to wish lists?
5. Take the pulse of engagement levels.
Before learners can enroll with you, they need to engage with your website. So connecting your web presence to Google Analytics or other marketing analytics platforms is an essential first step to gaining insight into your audience. You’ll learn where your visitors are from, how long they’re staying, what they’re viewing, and so on. The insights collected will help guide the improvement of your website’s appeal. It will provide you with a deeper understanding of your audience, and enable you to better target your marketing campaigns.
As a sales and marketing leader in your training organization, one of your top priorities is also enhancing engagement with your offer. So measuring engagement will provide you with a useful gauge on how you’re doing and where you can do better.
Learning analytics provides you with numerous options for getting more insight. For example, online quizzes for learners before and after a course can help you gauge the efficacy of your training. Online surveys can elicit both qualitative and quantitative feedback that can guide your instructors and instructional designers in future course development.
You can also gather insights on engagement during live activities such as in-person training, and webinars. By taking full advantage of your webinar provider’s tools such as polls, whiteboards, Q&A, and more you can easily see who is contributing and engaging.
Your LMS can also monitor social media shares by your learners. Similarly, you can track your gamification statistics, such as the badges earned, to discover what is attracting the interest of your learners.
As you can see, learning analytics and reporting tools provide essential support for your efforts to improve and grow your organization’s performance.
To learn more about how these tools can support your training and business objectives, connect with us. We’d be happy to share our insights with you!
