5 Secrets and techniques To Streamline And Measure ROI
Getting this feedback: 5 inside secrets
With budgets tight, one of the biggest challenges any business faces is providing its learners with effective feedback on their eLearning progress. In addition, companies also struggle to get feedback from learners on the completeness and quality of courses, resulting in poorer results for both teachers and learners. The good news, however, is that there are a number of ways you can streamline and automate the feedback process. These steps will improve your ROI while increasing student engagement.
Training programs are an important investment in an organization’s human capital and should be treated as such. A company should take the time to thoroughly analyze its in-company training, find opportunities for improvement, formulate solutions and set benchmarks for success. If your company wants a formalized review process, here are five efficient steps to streamline your training review process and measure ROI.
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eLearning 101: How to Create the Perfect Curriculum for Your Business
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1. Lay the foundation stone
Before starting the formal assessment process, you need to make sure that everything is in place and ready to go. Two important steps to achieve this are to involve everyone in your company in the eLearning training and feedback cycle and to carefully review everything before starting.
Get everyone on board
To benefit from this change, you should involve everyone in your organization in providing eLearning feedback. This includes executives, IT staff, HR staff and management teams. The more people involved in collecting and reviewing feedback, the better the information and ratings will be. This can also help you spot subtle trends that can be beneficial in managing your exercise program in the future. It is important that all employees have a uniform structure when it comes to feedback so that they know what to expect when answering each question.
To make the process easier, here are some key questions to consider at this stage:
- What is the desired learning outcome of your training?
- What are the advantages of achieving this desired learning outcome?
- How do you know that you are successful?
- What should your trainees be able to do at the end of their training?
- How does this contribute to your business goals?
- What is our intended ROI for this training?
- How do we measure the ROI?
When you understand the answers to these questions, you can create a strong, robust feedback system that empowers both learners and educators.
Check everything beforehand
It is important to review all training materials before going live as part of your normal eLearning development process. Reviewing early iterations helps ensure your team has the right time and resources in case issues arise once a course goes live.
We often find that in any course review there are almost always gaps in knowledge that the teacher takes for granted. Putting yourself in the learner’s shoes is difficult, but the ability to do so effectively is critical to developing strong training programs.
Reviews help consolidate and optimize your course so that it can be understood by everyone, regardless of their background of knowledge.
2. Focus on attending
It is difficult to get accurate and useful assessments of learning outcomes if you do not involve the participants with quantifiable participation.
Students who actively participate in forums, discussion forums, quizzes, discussions, etc. are more likely to remember information than those who passively watch videos or read passages for a long time. This translates into improved quality and understanding of the training program material, and also gives you measurable benchmarks that you can use to monitor progress. Here are some tips on how to get attendees involved in the process and get them to give thoughtful reviews:
- Publish the course in parts and collect reviews after each part. A course carried out over time is much more manageable than a huge project.
- Try participation forums – discussion forums that provide a central place to talk about course materials and content. Give additional marks for active participation in such forums and rate learners for accuracy and understanding.
- Test, test and examine the learners frequently and consistently in projects that demonstrate the practical application of the knowledge learned in class.
- Provide opportunities for personal feedback and acknowledge that learners have different views on feedback as they all have different interpersonal styles.
- Establish clear guidelines for the feedback process.
3. Provide incentives for feedback
It is also important to give learners an opportunity to provide feedback on your training program. The best way to understand the gaps in your exercise program starts with the people who actually go through the program.
In general, you should provide opportunities to involve participants and make it easy for them to provide feedback. Sometimes in-company training programs need to go a step further and actually encourage learners to provide feedback on how to improve the course.
There are numerous examples of how companies can provide targeted incentives for participants who provide feedback on their training, such as:
Focusing on providing incentives for feedback will make it easier for people to do so, even if it is inconvenient. Most people are self-motivated and are more likely to complete a survey or feedback questionnaire when encouraged. Don’t forget to get creative in this area! Depending on your industry and type of participant, you can offer rewards such as free movie tickets, vacations or corporate gifts for goals achieved. The list is endless and there are many valuable incentives to get participants to complete their feedback on your training.
4. Automate feedback
Collecting reviews or feedback can be tedious and time consuming. So why not make something easier by automating the process? Using the right online or automation tool eliminates the need to manually generate reports and significantly reduces the cost of collecting such feedback.
Use software that allows you to do several different types of reviews in one place, using simple templates and short questionnaires specific to each type of review you need to do. These software systems often have special types of feedback templates for students enrolled in different courses with different proficiency levels (e.g. beginner, intermediate, etc.).
Such software is usually built directly into most modern eLearning training platforms and allows you to monitor the progress of the participants directly about their work and to send automated notifications of certain milestones and achievements. It is important to collect this feedback before participants leave the course, complete their training program, or advance to the next level. Automating feedback can make it more timely and relevant, and evaluating or collecting feedback from attendees when it’s fresh usually leads to higher quality results.
5. Analyze your data
This is the final and most important step. You’ve gone through the other four steps and laid the groundwork, involved your attendees, and collected ratings and feedback through an automated system. Now is the time to take a look at what your feedback is telling you.
There are a few ways to do this:
Measure expectations vs. ROI
You have involved your team in the development process beforehand and set expectations and goals for the ROI in this training program. To analyze how successfully you have achieved that ROI, collect data on what can be quantified. This includes the time you spend watching videos and the time you spend on content. That way, you have data on which to build a success or failure determination. This quantitative data can be used to determine the ROI of the training program.
Analyze qualitative data
Collect information about what cannot be quantified, such as attitudes towards the company or their perception that they have learned something new. Identify which aspects of the program went well and how you could improve future efforts. Use qualitative data by asking participants and lecturers open-ended questions about their experiences with the eLearning module. Gather information about attitudes towards the company as well as information about the participants’ perception of whether they have learned something new by completing the eLearning module (qualitative).
Make a note of data trends
Use your feedback to determine where there is room for improvement in future eLearning and training efforts (e.g., number of modules completed, estimates of how well you have learned something new). This will help you make a plan for the future and make changes if necessary.
Optimize your training assessment process
Companies invest time and money in their training programs and use these resources to improve and develop participants’ skills and knowledge. But how do you know if the training worked?
Gathering feedback on a training program is important, but it can also require a huge investment and be prone to numerous errors. Because of this, you need a systematic approach to streamline your training assessment process.
You should always start by laying the groundwork and involving your team. Everyone should fully understand what you want to achieve. Then involve your participants in the process through incentives and rewards. Next, choose an automated system to collect your feedback and finally analyze the data received and make sure your ROI goals have been met.
graduation
By following these five secrets to streamline your training evaluation process, you can be assured that your training program is effective and is producing the results intended.
Download the eLearning 101 eBook: How to Build the Perfect Curriculum for Your Business to discover action points that you can follow to launch a bespoke L&D strategy for your team. It is required reading for companies weighing the pros and cons of outsourcing and wanting to learn more about curriculum design from industry experts.
