Do you know, one hour’s data today is more than one year’s data 20 years ago? Data is the bloodstream for any e-learning platform, and it is data that enables your learning management system (LMS) to provide you with valuable insights. LMS reporting then helps you in making informed decisions for your organization. 

Why is Data Important?

Every second loads of data is being generated, which is then analyzed and used by businesses to make timely decisions to get a competitive advantage. Similarly, data generated from your LMS can be of great value to you if you can analyze it properly. 

Data and LMS Reporting

The e-learning market is growing exponentially, and it is expected that its value will exceed USD 240 Billion by 2023. This is an alarming situation for you if you are not paying attention to your LMS reporting today because as time passes, your competition will increase and you may start losing your ground in the market.

LMS reporting can do wonders for your company if you know how. Here is a comprehensive guide for finding out the avenues in which data and LMS reporting can boost your effectiveness while creating and managing your content.

LMS Reporting Metrics that Help you Boost your Effectiveness

 

It is very important to understand which metric can help you in which way, now that you have decided to use LMS reporting to enhance your content with the backing of data analytics. You must understand and consider them while designing your content:

1. Course Status

Course status gives a very meaningful insight into your course completion rates. You can identify which of your courses are performing the best, the lowest, and average and then design your new courses accordingly. This metric can help you find the problems in the low-performing courses and identify the secret behind top-performing courses.

Course Status is an excellent metric for finding out about the hurdles and resistances in completing your courses within the expected period. This LMS reporting metric will identify the problem for you in a matter of a few seconds. After that, all you need to do is bring changes in your course outline and structure and optimize your LMS interface for better performance.

Edly understands the importance of data and hence, provides comprehensive reports to clients to help them improve their services. Our clients utilize the LMS reporting tools at Edly, as shown below, which helps them plan their future content more efficiently.

2. Content Traffic

The number of views on each course is also a great insight into LMS reporting as it helps in understanding the kind of courses people are more interested in. Course authors can use this data while planning for the new courses and their content.

The number of enrollments in a course over time can help the instructors in understanding the seasonality of the course. This data can also help in exploring the factors leading to the change in enrollments and finding ways to make up for the decline if any.

3. Time-logs

Time-logs of each course give an excellent insight into the difficulty and effectiveness of the course. If most learners take longer than expected hours, then there is a problem that needs to be addressed timely. The following problems can be faced potentially by your learners:

• Incomplete or unclear course content
• Assessments are too challenging
• Learners lack the basic knowledge
• Glitches in the course

In an e-learning platform, these LMS reports are an eye-opener for the course authors because if courses are made too challenging and strenuous for learners, they might shift to another platform. 

An excellent way to deal with this challenge would be to let learners enroll in a technical or advanced course only when they have completed that subject’s introductory or beginner’s level course. This concept, also known as prerequisite courses or prerequisite course material, ensures the right learners have the right skills for the courses they are enrolled in.

These features on Edly’s LMS help our clients assess the problematic sections in the course that are proving to be an obstacle for learners. If most of the learners are unable to complete more than 50% of the course, then that means the first 50% of the course content needs to be reviewed.

4. Grades & Assessments

The most common and conventional way to measure the effectiveness of a course is to assess the learners’ grades. Thanks to the amazing features available on e-learning platforms, authors can now design assessments such as polls, questionnaires, short answers, pre, and post-quizzes, etc.

You can also limit the users from using external help from the internet or their peers by using time limit options or shuffling the question. These options, also known as timed exams and content randomization, can help ensure that the terms of your honor code are being met.

How to Leverage Data to Improve Your Course

Data is a powerful tool that can help you in multiple ways; all you need to learn is how to use data to make your existing courses even better. Here are some insights you must keep track of regularly to optimize your courses:

5. Satisfaction Ratings

The learners’ ratings on your LMS bring firsthand insights about their satisfaction levels; this data can be analyzed through sentiment analysis. Ratings are a super-useful metric for improving your content, and you can always get back to those learners for detailed feedback about their experience at the LMS platform.

6. Average View Time

The average view time on each slide tells us about a fascinating insight. The more time a learner spends reading the content on a slide, the better it is. If your content is interesting and engages the reader’s attention, that’s great for you; however, if the average view time is low, that means the content needs to be improved. It can be done using more visuals, different colors, improving the structure, or upgrading the content.

7. Correct Attempts

While designing the content, the content author might not realize if the quiz questions are too easy or too difficult for the learner. However, LMS reporting can reveal the number of correct attempts on each question which can help in a sound assessment.

For example, if 10 students took a quiz with 3 questions in it, the number of students that correctly answered each question can help you understand how easy or difficult the quiz was so you can come up with corrective measures. If a large number of students fail to submit the right answer for a question, the course author needs to recheck the question and figure out the issue. 

Some possible issues are listed below:

The question is

• not based on the course content
• too hard for this level of course
• not phrased correctly
• based on a topic that was not properly understood by the students

How can LMS Reporting Benefit You?

Now that you have learned a little bit  about the LMS reporting metrics to improve your content’s efficiency, let’s discuss the benefits of LMS reporting, which you can avail:

• Generating Real-Time Reports

The best way to keep track of your students, employees, or learners, in general, is to generate multiple real-time reports. You can track down each learner’s progress by comparing their performance before and after taking the course. 

LMS analytics can also be a great source for you to monitor the progress of your organization’s learners at each stage of the training process. 

• Balancing the output with cost

LMS reporting can help you in evaluating the output of the training. Training is not free of cost; a lot of effort, time, and money is spent. It is important to balance the output from the training with the cost incurred. The output can be measured in the form of new skills learned or increased work performance.

Edly is helping organizations build successful learning management systems and providing services to improve their experience. LMS reporting tools used by these organizations prove to be a game-changer, enabling them to understand their learners’ needs better.