We recently looked at how organisations can evaluate training effectiveness by covering Professor Donald Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation:

1. Reaction – what learners think and feel about the training having undertaken it

2. Learning – how well learners have retained the knowledge delivered by the training

3. Behaviour – how well the learner has put the knowledge into practice

4. Results – what overall impact the training has had

As we discussed, e-learning can be particularly useful for evaluating the second of Kirkpatrick’s four levels – how well learners have retained knowledge. This is because e-learning platforms like Wranx typically have evaluation built into the learning process, with drills and end-of-unit assessments able to provide instant, actionable insights.

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The evaluative capabilities of e-learning platforms don’t stop there though. Their typically digital, cloud-based nature means they can offer a host of ways to interpret and present insights into training effectiveness in understandable and valuable ways.

Analytics

Plenty of people are familiar with the concept of analytics nowadays, not least through the lens of website performance. Google Analytics, for example, provides data about things like the number of visits a website gets, how people come to a website and how long they spend there. E-learning analytics are similar, in providing data about things like learner activity and performance. They can either provide information for learners about their individual performance, or for organisations about the overall performance of their learners.

Dashboards

Dashboards are a way of conveying high-level information quickly and clearly. By providing an at-a-glance overview of more detailed analytics, they can give people instant insights into key information to keep them up to speed on learner performance. Often, dashboards are also customisable, allowing users to choose what information is displayed for them.

Visualisations

There’s nothing new about visualising information to make it easier for people to understand. Whereas it can be a time-consuming process to do manually, though, many e-learning platforms have visualisation functionalities built in, so that information can be automatically and instantly displayed in a clear and understandable way.

League tables

In e-learning, league tables are typically used as a means of gamification, using competition between learners to encourage engagement. They can also act as a means of measurement for learners, though, by showing their performance in relation to others. Indeed, this sort of comparative measurement gives an insight into learning that other approaches cannot.