How To Evaluate Your Online Training Effectiveness In 5 Steps
Putting together an eLearning course is no simple task. It involves a lot of time by multiple people, and numerous resources invested, in order to design and develop a successful training program. With that said, nobody wants to spend all that time and energy and not know if it even works. Assessing your online courses for effectiveness in the workplace is important so that you can see what works and what needs improvement. Here are 5 ways to help you understand better whether your training is really effective.
1. Watch And Learn
What better way to see if your employees understand what they’ve learned in training than by watching them at work? Observing how they are implementing newly gained knowledge in their day-to-day activities will provide you with a lot of information. Can they perform easily what they learned, or do they have to ask for help?
2. Utilize Assessments After Training
Testing is pretty standard and still a good way to gauge whether your employees understand critical knowledge and skills or not. For example, if most of your staff aren’t grasping a certain concept and failing all, or a portion of the assessment, then it’s safe to assume that you may need to rework the training material in order to improve understanding.
Some Learning Management Systems (LMSs), like ShareKnowledge, even go one step further in their assessments by offering more granular information about the effectiveness of your training. The Question-Level Report is a great tool that allows trainers to dive much deeper into the analytics of their training. Not only can they assess how well learners did, but they can also assess the test itself.
As an example, let’s say you create a quiz and assign it to 50 people. In traditional reporting, you can see high-level information, such as how many people passed and how many failed. With Question-Level reporting, you can actually see how many people got question #5 wrong, for instance. Now, if everyone is getting that same question wrong, then there is a high chance there is something wrong with the question and you can reword it next time. If the results show a mixed bag, trainers can decide whether it’s something that can be addressed with more training, or change the wording, or implement both.
3. Get Social
Utilizing social features is another great way to know if your training is working. By nature, humans are social and they like learning from one another. It is also known that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. Why not turn your employees into instructors, or guide a discussion with social features? When they’re able to 'transfer' the message to their fellow employees that is a very good sign you’re doing something right.
Whether you’re using social features in your LMS, or with something like SharePoint community sites, it’s well worth encouraging. Community sites give the user a forum experience which is intended to cultivate discussions with a broad group of people across an organization. Anyone within your business can ask a question or give an opinion to start a discussion in the community where others can like or comment. The person who started the thread can even mark the 'best reply', as well as make it a featured discussion. There is also an element of gamification in community sites with the badges feature. Badges can be assigned to members to indicate their status in the community, that is to say, a subject expert.
4. Use Performance Goals
Creating goals for the performance of your employees is a good way to see just how well your training works. But, in order to do this, you must compare performance before and after training. To keep them focused on their performance goals throughout their online training experience, always link your training back to performance expectations. Use assignments that simulate real-life processes, and help employees put their skills to practice.
5. Ask Your Staff Their Thoughts On Surveys
And lastly, ask your employees what they think of the training you have provided. Constructive criticism for your eLearning course will provide a good insight into what is working and what is not, so you can improve it. When giving a survey, be sure to ask questions that will give an idea of their satisfaction with the training, and whether they would recommend it to their colleagues, and what topics were of most interest.
