Using Learner Data To Drive Better Engagement
Learner engagement is that essential element that can separate a successful training program from a less effective one. But engagement is often unpredictable to design for, let alone measure (if it’s measured at all).
What if you could gain an in-depth understanding of what actually drives learner engagement? Better yet, what if you could create a repeatable process for delivering engaging digital learning courses?
The answer is data. With the right data, it becomes easier to understand how different learning styles engage with your learning content and how participant preferences drive outcomes. Course developers can use data to re-envision their learning programs and design more efficient courses aligned with both learner needs and desired outcomes.
Learner Metrics to Track
Here are some of the key learner metrics to measure when focusing on improving engagement.
Completion Rate of Training
It’s natural for your training course to have some dropouts. When you take a closer look at the completion rate of training, this can help you understand why and when employees leave a particular program.
While some people may leave a course for reasons outside of your control (for example, they determined they didn’t need that certification, or they ran out of time), learners may abandon training programs due to boredom or disinterest. Completion rate is a major opportunity for you to see which programs, modules, or sections are driving the most engagement and which might be falling flat. These insights might alert you that a topic is too advanced or hard to digest for that learner’s stage of development, or that the information isn’t being conveyed clearly enough. Check if your LMS or other tracking system can supply you with completion rate data, in order to avoid the time-consuming process of tracking this manually.
Return on Investment (ROI)
ROI is likely what your organization’s C-level executives are most interested in seeing from your courses, but it’s also an essential metric for you to gauge the impact of your learning programs. If you’re not seeing much ROI from your courses, odds are that:
Your courses aren’t focused on the right skills to make a difference to your organization’s bottom line, or
Your courses aren’t engaging learners, which means they’re not retaining or implementing their new skills.
A positive ROI doesn’t only justify your courses to your boss, it also justifies them to your learners. For example, imagine you’re measuring ROI of a sales training course by looking at the sales pipeline before learners take the course and again after. If your pipeline increases by 20%, you have proof that the course was effective and engaging. You can even use this data to motivate other learners to take the course, which will naturally increase their engagement level.
You can measure ROI by looking at the before and after picture in any scenario:
Software onboarding: measure an employee’s actions before and after learning how to use a new tool
Safety training: measure the number of incidents before and after your course
Productivity: look at the cost to execute a process before training and after
Customer satisfaction: collect customer Net Promoter Score data before and after the training
Learning Experience and Satisfaction Rate
There’s no better source of data regarding engagement and effectiveness than the learner, themselves. Collect and observe data regarding the learner’s experience in your programs. Build in a feedback loop for your learning program that prompts learners to complete surveys, polls, and questionnaires upon competition.
The main goal is to understand if:
The learner’s objectives were met
Their confidence on the subject matter increased
The course length, flow, and UI were supportive of their learning and engagement
The course was relevant to them and their role
Compare answers to these questions across the group of learners: where do opinions overlap? What are the key takeaways? For example, you might discover a majority of learners enjoyed multimedia content and felt most engaged when consuming video. Or perhaps interactive or game-based content, like on-the-job simulations, was the most memorable aspect of your program. Whatever your findings, use this data to create more impactful programs by integrating user feedback and requirements.
On the flip side, if learner satisfaction is low, this may be a signal to bring in a third-party consultant to help identify opportunities and make an action plan for improvement.
Leverage Experience API (xAPI) Software
Your learner’s experience, and the data you collect, is only as good as your digital tools. You may have a wealth of data available through your learning management system (LMS), but what about the other tools you use to interact with your learners?
This is where Experience API (xAPI) software can help. With xAPI, you can merge data from a number of sources, both online and offline, in order to track learning activities with more accuracy and intelligence.
xAPI helps you understand and measure the learning activities happening in the company. It can find data that is usually quite difficult to track. This gives you a clearer picture of the performance of each learning program, its effectiveness, and how the employees are interacting with it. Here are a couple more benefits of using xAPI to collect data.
Ability to Integrate
xAPI allows different learning platforms to synchronize and integrate without costing money and time. You can migrate data from one learning system to another with xAPI, without the hassle of doing this with outdated manual processes. Using a broader suite of learning tools to get a bigger picture of your learner, you’ll be able to create a more informed plan to increase engagement.
Most data you have can be easily extracted and transferred not only with your learning management system but other analytics tools and dashboards. xAPI allows you to share more complete data more efficiently with all stakeholders within the organization.
Conclusion
Data analytics in virtual learning programs give course developers the power to develop more immersive educational experiences for learners of different backgrounds and learning styles. Fortunately, training on a corporate scale offers a vast amount of data that course developers can leverage to redefine their strategies — and when combined with xAPI, it’s far easier to make educated improvements to learner engagement (rather than just making educated guesses!)
If you have specific questions about using learner data to increase engagement, xAPI, or creating dashboards to track learner data in order to gain deeper insights on learner engagement, please get in touch with us. We’re happy to help.
