Which LMS Reports Should Be Included In Your Next Learning Management System
When you think about what features you need from your Learning Management System (LMS), your first thoughts are probably the features that will improve the eLearning experience for your students. While this is incredibly important, you also need to think about how your LMS can make your life easier as well, and this is where reporting comes in.
Though it may not be the first thing you look for when you’re shopping around for learning management systems, reporting does need to be a factor in your decision-making process. You need to ensure you can pull the data you need from anywhere in your LMS, whenever you need it, to give you an accurate picture of how your eLearning is performing at any given time.
Today we’re going to look at the essential reports that you need to be able to pull from your LMS to allow you to measure your training effectively!
1. Time Spent On Each eLearning Course
It can be hard to measure how much time your students should be spending on eLearning courses as they are designed to be completed in chunks, whenever your students have time to do some studying. This means that even though a class could be completed in a week or two if a student was working on it full time, it could end up stretching over many months if a student is only putting in a couple of hours per week.
However, LMS reporting will allow you to see the amount of actual time a student spends working on a course, by measuring how much time they spend logged into your LMS and the activities they complete in that time.
This will give you an indication of whether your students are making good progress through your classes, as you should have a rough idea of how long each course will take to complete in full. It can also highlight if any students are getting stuck on particular areas of the course and spending much more time on specific modules than you would expect.
Not only does this give you the chance to raise any potential problems with your students, but it also allows you to look over your course content and see if there are any sticking points which could be tripping people up. Perhaps, one section of the course is a little confusing or is missing the required detail for your students to grasp the concept entirely.
Always being aware of how your students are interacting with your courses will let you know where any problems are and highlights areas which you could improve on for the future.
2. Satisfaction Ratings Per Course
Surveying your students to see how much they enjoyed a course and their interactions with you as a training company is an important task to undertake. You want to make sure that your customers are happy with the experience you are providing them, and if they’re not, then you can take steps to make sure you challenge any problems head-on.
While it’s great to have stats on the overall performance of your training company and your teaching staff, it’s more useful still to have the feedback broken down by each course your run, so you can quickly and easily see the overall satisfaction rate for all of your classes.
This can help you pinpoint any courses which may need improvement, as you will be able to see which courses have low ratings or specific problems raised against them.
3. Qualification Tracking
While some training may be a one-off, lots of training needs to be topped up periodically to ensure it remains valid. This means the same students may return to you again and again to complete their training to ensure they stay certified.
This is an excellent remarketing opportunity for as you can alert students to the fact their training is about to run out and encourage them to come back to you for repeat business.
However, how are you going to keep track of this to make sure you don’t miss out on that future business? The best way to do this is to mark on each course of this type how long that qualification stays valid for from the completion date. Then, you will be able to pull a report which shows the upcoming dates where the training will run out. Pulling this report every few months or so will show you the list of people you need to alert about their training running out, and hopefully encourage them to repurchase from you to complete their training again.
4. Completion Rates
Not every student who buys a course from your will complete it. Sometimes life gets in the way, but sometimes people give up on a course because they are not enjoying them, they’re too complicated, or they don’t cover the topics your students expect them to.
While one or two people not completing a course will probably happen from time to time, if you notice a large number of students giving up on courses and never finishing them, then perhaps it’s time to look at your course content and see if you could make any improvements.
Completion rate reports will enable you to quickly see if there are any courses which have higher than average non-completion rates, so you will be able to see if there are any problems with your course content you need to deal with.
You can also get in touch with the students who have not completed your courses, as you can quickly pull all their data from your LMS report. This will enable you to ask them why they didn’t finish the course, as this may make fixing the problem more manageable. You can also encourage them to go back and complete the course once you have dealt with these problems!
5. Assessment Results Throughout The Course
Pulling reports on assessment results is vital for a number of reasons. It allows you to see which students have passed and which have failed, but it’s also crucial to be able to look at results of mini-assessments or mid-course assessments as well as these could indicate a student is having a problem before they hit the final assessment at the end.
If a student is failing all the mid-course assessments, then chances are they’re not going to be able to complete the course. Having this information to hand will allow you to get in touch with the student and address any problems they are having. You could also offer additional teaching support if possible to help them complete and pass the course.
Additionally, this is another way to flag up any potential problems with your course content. If lots of students are failing a particular assessment, then maybe it’s time to have another look at it and see if there are any problems. Are all the questions clear? Does the prior course material cover everything in enough detail? It’s important to check to make sure you are providing your students with the best learning experience possible.