The most telling stage in your corporate eLearning strategy occurs after-the-fact. Evaluation provides you with the data you need to tweak your program into meeting your goals and receiving the highest ROI on your efforts. You’ll want to evaluate the program from two angles to discover how well the learners absorbed the material, and how well it applies in the workplace. When the answer to both is “good,” the training program is a success, and all that’s left to do is tweak the outcomes to “excellent.” We’ll look at three major opportunities to explore the effectiveness of the strategy.
Learner Evaluations Give Insight into Performance
Yes, it matters what the learners think because if the learner isn’t engaged, learning cannot take place. Use evaluations and surveys conducted at the end of the training to assess level of interest, engagement, interactivity and understanding of the material. If job one is to engage the learner, you can incorporate changes into the learning on-the-fly and/or at the next scheduled update based on the feedback you receive from learners.
Testing Tells the Story of Comprehension
Quizzes and tests built into the eLearning program allow you to assess not only the student’s progress but also the overall effectiveness of the program. You can tell by the individual question/answer sets what material needs a little tweaking or a major overhaul. Further, by testing at frequent intervals throughout the program, you can add branches to the program to accommodate areas that might need more explanation to a subset of the learners.
Practical Application in the Workplace
This is the crucial factor that determines the success of your training program. It doesn’t matter how the students like the program or how well the program “teaches the test” if learners cannot apply what they’ve learned in the workplace setting. If increased efficiency on the job is the goal, the metrics will reveal the information you need. If the training addresses safety or other government regulations, you’ll know by a decrease in internally reported infractions (not to mention fewer government fines) that the training hit the mark.
Once you complete the evaluations, you can adjust tactics to increase engagement, create remedial training and add components to the training to address workplace issues rather than “book” issues. One of the next steps might be to take your learning social. That one step could help you avoid an eLearning overhaul, engage learners and provide mentors to those who need additional help.
