Turning Learning Measurement Issues into Successful Analytics

Turning Learning Measurement Issues into Successful Analytics
Summary: Did you know that 86% of organizations are focused on reporting, but only 15% of HR functions have strong analytics capabilities? This leads to a disconnect between Learning and Development (L&D) and Corporate within organizations.

The Google Analytics Approach to Measuring Learning

Today, L&D measures time-in-training, completion rates, and test scores. Unfortunately, these do not identify whether the learning management system you are providing is actually working.

Xyleme Vice President of Marketing Dawn Poulos spoke about these challenges for L&D organizations at the ASTD International Conference in May. Companies struggle to develop high-impact learning organizations (HILO) where content capability is the top predictor of becoming a HILO. Finding meaningful data about the content’s performance is also difficult.


Issues include rapid authoring tools that do not allow for content reuse or scalability, content being locked inside each individual course like a black box, and content not being broken down into granular, easy-to-find, reusable pieces. These challenges can lead to poor or incomplete reporting, which often leads to poor decision making.

At Xyleme, we have created a concept we call “The Google Analytics Approach to Measuring Learning.” This approach uses a similar method to measure learning content data that a website owner would use for website content data. When it comes to measurement, learning content and website content differ very little.

Learning managers want the same things as web content managers—more visitors! And beyond that, they want the ability to dive deeper inside the course to uncover what learning objects are working through which specific measures. Metrics can offer valuable insight, such as the number of unique visitors to the training materials, the keywords that were used to search for the training materials, and the amount of time learners spent on viewing the training materials.

Tying content to business results allows corporations to make sound decisions based on real data, and allow the L&D team to show its true value to the organization.

Dawn Poulos also wrote a blog about this topic. In it, she compared a list of the most important web analytics substituted with learning analytics to prove the point that there is little difference between the two functions. She demonstrated how important it is for overall business results to approach learning measurement in this innovative way.

Because this topic is so important to us at Xyleme, we have put together a survey on the current state of learning measurement to uncover the pain points experienced by many L&D organizations.

You can learn more about the new concept of learning measurement by attending a free webinar titled “The Google Analytics Approach to Measuring Learning: Allowing You to Move at the Speed of Business,” hosted by Brandon Hall Group. Principal and Chief Strategy Officer Michael Rochelle will present how to apply “Google” content metrics as well as how to use those metrics successfully to measure your own training content. Michael will teach attendees how single-source technology creates a huge opportunity to improve the value and ROI significantly when developing and deploying learning content in your organization.

The free webinar will be held on Thursday, May 22, 2014 from 1:00-2:00 PM Eastern, so register today to explore more about this important topic affecting your L&D Organization.