Tips For Using Training Metrics For the Measurement of E-Learning Effectiveness

Jamie Clark
4 min readFeb 14, 2020

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Employee training is essential for boosting employee creativity, competitive advantage, and productivity, which in turn result in high ROI or return on investment. However, every training program does not produce the desired outcomes. In fact, ineffective training programs can create an adverse impact on business operations. In such a situation, training metrics are there to aid you to detect the problems, to make sure that they are not repeated and to make improvements in the training activities. With training metrics, you can control the problem in the initial stages before they go out of your hand completely.

What Training Effectiveness Actually Means?

When you define effectiveness in the context of training, the meaning can vary a lot. Mostly, effectiveness relates to a high return on your financial investment. Then, you also look for the improvement in the performance of learners in the training program, such as higher productivity, or good teamwork. Before initiating a training program, you must ensure that the company’s management and other members of the organization have already decided about the goals to be accomplished with the training and how to measure its effectiveness.

Although there are several techniques to measure the effectiveness of training, a few of the crucial training metrics are as follows:

Tips For Using Engagement Metrics

When you start a training program, you invest a lot of time, effort and financial resources to make it successful, and so it is quite helpful to know that the learners are showing interest and are engaging with it. If your learners’ engagement is zero, then their learning is also nil, and therefore, your workforce will not be able to get closer to accomplish the specific training and development goals that you have already set.

Following are few of the sections you should look for with the training metrics:

· How much time is spent: You must analyze that is there any activity that is giving a hard time to learners? Do your employees need more support, or whether a particular activity is too hard?

· Time taken to finish the course: You should identify whether learners have taken a lot of time to finish the course? Whether the course is easy, difficult, or time-taking?

· Rate of course completion: You should keep a check on the number of learners who have managed to finish the complete course.

· Rate of activity completion: You should identify the activities that learners fail to complete and the reasons behind this lagging.

· Rate of learners’ drop-off: You should find out the number of learners who are not interested in completing the course.

· The drop-off points: You should find out which areas of the course are responsible for the drop-off learners and what are the reasons.

All the aforementioned metrics are collected automatically by your LMS that is the Learning Management System. Another important thing is that you can also study reports that are automatically generated by the LMS. Such insights are used in changing and testing numerous variations of any e-learning course and improving the effectiveness of your learners’ training.

Learning Experience

Now, that you have learned that training metrics are essential to understand if your training efforts are yielding fruitful results or not, it is also crucial that you consider whether your workforce has got a good learning experience or not.

Your employees may have different experiences. They may feel that training was just a piece of cake, or it was too difficult, or was totally irrelevant and has no connection with their career goals, or was quite boring, and so on. Based on their experience, they will rate your organization’s training program. Hence, you can say that training is a vital tool to attract powerful candidates for the job and retain exceptional talent.

Now the question arises that how can you measure the learning experience. With the help of feedback and survey tools, you can measure user experiences. The elements that learners can rate easily include:

· The quality of training content and material

· The relevancy factor of the training

· The facilitation quality if applicable

· The easiness in navigating via the learning path

· The suitability of the training assessments

· The feedback quality

· The e-learning course covering the overall experience

By applying modern e-learning authoring tools, you can develop surveys without any difficulty when the e-learning course is finished. A top-quality survey contains a minimum twenty questions and incorporates an interpreted scale that is easy to comprehend.

LMS Metrics For Measuring Training Effectiveness

By using metrics for identifying problems and making improvements in the learners’ learning experience, you can enhance the training value for your learners as well as the business. If you wish to measure all the metrics by just clicking a button, you must choose an LMS that offers the right features and tools. Hence, you must ensure that your LMS is providing you highly-extensive and efficient survey and reporting engines that can support your continued training measurements and improvements.

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