tracking
when they’re at a desk. Learners are turning to mobile and tablet devices, picking up and dropping off a single course at their leisure, instead of sitting down for thirty or forty minutes at a time to complete a course. If you only create or monitor learning that takes place on desktop computers - just one aspect of the learning experience today - you are missing important pieces of the e-learning puzzle. Multi-device authoring tools today allow learning to be built, tracked and analysed from one place, giving a full picture of the path learners take through a course. Improved learning analytics are transforming the world of e-learning. xAPI
tracking, which tracks the whole, multi-device learning experience, gives us much more information than was previously available through SCORM, the standard which tracked basic data for desktop courses.
The benefits of tracking and building up data Tracking an individual or a single department’s progress allows you to deliver a far more personalised learning experience. You can pinpoint specific questions that learners are struggling with and identify why this is the case, whether cultural factors or because the question wasn’t quite right. Appropriate measures can then be taken to provide the learner with additional tools and resources - websites, thought pieces or videos - in order to help them better comprehend the topic. E-learning designers can also use this information to build content which targets specific learner needs far more efficiently than ever before. The more you know about your learners’ progress, the more tailored your learning experiences will be. No two learners are alike and learning analytics enable e-learning professionals to ensure that no two learning experiences are alike, either.
By tracking how well an individual is performing, online facilitators can predict who is likely to pass a course and who is likely to fail. This allows us to ready additional support for those learners who haven’t performed quite as well, improving course effectiveness and providing a more meaningful learning experience, which can in turn improve course retention rates. Opting for an authoring tool with inbuilt analytics functionality enables you to
keep a close eye on the learning trends within your organization, which is vital to the overall success of your e-learning programmes and strategy. Having a full overview of how people are performing at every point of a particular campaign enables you to achieve higher quality e-learning at a lower cost, as it becomes clear where you should devote your resources.
Using tools which let you track analytics The best mobile learning tools will collect all the data you could possibly need using demographic filters to help you understand the learning and performance trends across your organisation. They will come with in-built analytics functionality to help you identify where exactly people are going wrong and provide a clear breakdown across devices and location. The more data you have, the more you can understand your workforce. The
A one-size-fits-all approach will not be as effective as one which has been carefully sculpted based on learning analytics.
more you understand your workforce, the more you can create content that you know will work for them, further improving not only the quality of courses but also how learning is perceived.
Translating analytics into learning Once we have this rich bank of data available, we need to know what to do with it. It is all too common for organisations to collect data, then do nothing with it while they move on to their next challenge. Armed with this crucial data, you need to start thinking about the reasons behind a learner’s struggle with specific content and find solutions to help boost their performance. It is important to get to the bottom of any weak performances or inconsistencies so that these can be targeted more closely with future initiatives. Insights from learning analytics should feed straight back into learning design, as instructors can create content based on trends detected in an organisation’s learning records. This may be a case of including more explanation or more interactive elements based on the way learners have performed with previous content. For example, courses can focus on specific topics or offer more assessment questions. Analytics help designers to build better content, which allows students to get much more out of their e-learning experience.
Achieving results The more we know, the better we can help learners achieve their personal ambitions and the goals of the company. We should think of the learning analytics process as a cycle. The data we collect should inform our next revision of the content. The data from this revision should then be analysed, and should feed into the next version. If this process continues, it should be easy to notice a marked difference in the performance of our learners. The key to achieving success through learning analytics is to create fully customised programmes. A one-size- fits-all approach will not be as effective as one which has been carefully sculpted based on learning analytics.
Mike Alcock is the managing director of gomo @mikey_alcock
Opting for an authoring tool with inbuilt analytics functionality enables you to keep a close eye on the learning trends within your organization, which is vital to the overall success of your e-learning programmes and strategy.
e.learning age september 2015 31
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