What you should be reporting on for your training

Already using a Learning Management System to train your team? Great! Now the next step is knowing how to use your LMS for reporting purposes. Your LMS platform is most likely full of insightful data that you can be tracking, to really start improving the performance of your team.

This data is invaluable when it comes to interpreting the learning habits of your employees, while also showing whether or not the LMS is delivering value to your organisation. You’ll be able to build a comprehensive profile of your employee’s learning habits, which you can use to personalise your eLearning materials and create far more effective training courses.

Keen to start tracking learning data from your LMS? The first thing you need to do is figure out which data is worth looking at. Learning Management Systems contain a huge amount of data, so you need to know what’s worthwhile.

Here are some of the key areas you should be reporting on if you want to start improving your employee training.

Are Employees Finishing the Course?

You can first look to see just how many team members are completing the online training courses. Your LMS should be able to track completion rates for each staff member.

By looking at the time taken for employees to complete each course, and even the individual modules inside them, you can gain an understanding of the effectiveness of your eLearning courses. If employees aren’t finishing them, they may be too difficult. Or the course materials may feel irrelevant, or not engaging enough to hold the attention of your learners.

On the other hand, if employees are consistently breezing through eLearning courses, your course content may not be challenging enough.

Look at eLearning Assessment Results

Obviously, the data you obtain from your employees’ online assessments provides you with a lot of insight into how they’re tracking.

If the majority of your staff are passing the training courses, and getting high scores in online tests, your eLearning courses are likely to be both effective and successful.

Christoforos Pappas, of eLearning Industry, suggests inviting online learners to take a pre-assessment before the eLearning course, then using your findings to choose specific activities and modules that best suit their needs.

“eLearning assessment data also gives you the power to identify online learners' strengths and weaknesses, which you can then use to create personal learning paths,” explains Pappas.

Ask for Feedback from Staff

As well as getting employees to take online assessments, you can also ask them to provide feedback on the course.

This gives learners an open opportunity to be honest about what was good (or bad) about the course, how relevant they found the content, and if they enjoyed taking the course overall. In asking for this feedback, your LMS is giving you really clear and valuable data that you can use to further improve your courses.

Employees tend to be quite comfortable providing feedback online, as it’s much easier to give honest opinions to an eLearning platform than it is to a manager, face-to-face.

On that note, you could also include an anonymous survey section, for employees to leave feedback on the course instructor. This will help evaluate the effectiveness of online training instructors.

Using Your LMS to Report on Staff Training

As you can see, there’s a lot to be gained from the data in your Learning Management System.

As Kirstie Greany from Elucidat says, if you want to know if your learning is hitting the mark, look to your dashboard.

Greany explains how data can help you tap into your audiences to design a higher quality product that can give you an edge over competition.

“If you notice scores are continually low in a key area — it could be the question needs a tweak, you may have to provide further learning in that area, or they just need to try again —perhaps it’s meant to be hard! A bit of digging around will soon tell you if you need to make a quick change or not.”

Think of it like adjusting your sails to the winds. Tracking and interpreting data from your LMS should be a regular and ongoing process. By making constant adjustments to your eLearning courses, you can start getting the best possible results from your training materials and your employees.