Some things in life are easy to measure and understand, and some things are trickier to grasp: your current waist measurement in relation to the pants size you wore in college, for example—easy to understand—for better or for worse.
On the other hand, other things aren’t as easy to quantify, such as eLearning ROI. It’s especially slippery because it doesn’t always deal with numbers, but with humans and their behavior.
While you may not be able to assign a numerical value to the exact ROI you receive by implementing an eLearning program for training and education, it’s possible to identify the ways eLearning has improved efficiency, achieved a goal and ultimately, balanced your bottom line.
Create Measurable Goals
Before you can measure your eLearning ROI, you must first create a vision for the end result. Tom Kelly, VP of Internet Learning Solutions Group at Cisco Systems, Inc., tells Workforce Magazine, “To prove the full ROI of eLearning you need to measure its value.” You can’t measure value without first visualizing the end result. Whether you’re aiming for better customer satisfaction, faster training, or better information retention, you’ll need to create your eLearning curriculum with that vision in mind. This can also help you relay your goals as you communicate with your instructional design expert.
Project Timeline
While you may not be able to measure exactly what each user gets out of the eLearning experience, you can measure the time frame in which the curriculum is designed, delivered, and put into action.
By creating a realistic timeline, you can later measure eLearning ROI based on whether deadlines were met and the resources required to get the program from vision to completion and delivery. In general, the longer a project takes, the more resources you’re using, which eventually translates to lower ROI for the project.
Retention and Efficiency
Some of your ROI won’t be apparent until after all of the users have completed the course material.
Ideally, you should start to see a return in the retention and application of the material in daily business. Whether the eLearning was a safety course for new recruits or implementing a new sales program, regular employee audits and evaluations can help you see whether or not the new program was worth the time and money put into it.
Production Costs
It all boils down to the bottom line. You’ll be hard-pressed to efficiently measure eLearning ROI without a clear idea of what that investment was.
Don’t measure only monetary costs such as outsourcing the instructional design—take other elements into consideration, such as the time spent on the project, travel costs, content costs, and the actual expenditure of time and effort for the learners themselves. When there are lackluster results in spite of the production costs and time involved, you may need to rethink your strategy for user engagement and lower initial costs to better balance eLearning ROI.
How is ROI Calculated?
It’s almost impossible to come up with a hard calculation for a quantifiable ROI number. Instead, tools like Kirkpatrick’s Training Evaluation Model can serve as a foundation for figuring out whether your investment in eLearning was worth it or not. Kirkpatrick’s model uses four levels of evaluation (Reaction, Learning, Behavior, Impact), and, when combined, helps you create a more complete picture of how eLearning has affected your users and your bottom line. Try implementing Kirkpatrick’s four evaluation levels as part of your organization’s unique ROI assessment.
Measuring eLearning ROI will never be an exact science, and for good reason: Learning happens through connection, emotion, practice, and experience. By framing your evaluation in a more human way, you’ll gain a better perspective to create, execute, and adapt your eLearning so it’s as effective as possible.
