4 Tips To Measure The Effectiveness Of An eLearning Course For Your Employees

4 Tips To Measure The Effectiveness Of An eLearning Course For Your Employees
Summary: Irrespective of how much time you spend on designing and developing trainings, they could not be considered effective until and unless you have decided on some proven techniques to determine the success of these trainings. In this article I will share 4 tips on measuring the effectiveness of an eLearning course and finding out whether your employees have really learnt what you wanted to teach them.

How To Measure The Effectiveness Of An eLearning Course For Your Employees 

In order to find out whether or not your employees have really picked up what you intended to teach them through eLearning, you need to set them up for some real-life challenges and see how they fare in them. Here I will share a couple of tips to measure the effectiveness of an eLearning course for your employees.

  1. Observe newly-imparted skills on the job.
    Large scale enterprises often make their employees undergo full-fledged training modules to understand their job responsibilities. One way to determine whether or not the employees have understood what they have been taught is to test them with some real-life tasks and ask them to apply their newly-acquired knowledge. At the same time, the task monitors should carefully observe them and make note of the changes in behaviors they display after knowing their job roles in greater detail. The few critical questions and observations to consider at this point include change in the employee’s behavior and attitude, improving on his existing skillset, confidence in explaining issues and resolving them, and more. It would be great if the task monitors could perform this exercise for each employee before and after they have attended the training. The comparative analysis would definitely fetch you better results. If they fail in any of the given tasks, you may want to revisit the training content and exercises.
  2. Ask for feedback from the employees.
    If you wish to measure the range of effectiveness that eLearning courses had on your employees, prepare a fluid questionnaire. You will find that the employees now won’t give you mechanical and rehearsed answers, but innovative ones. They would have gained practical experience from simulated atmosphere created in eLearning courses. The employees would be more clinical in tackling crisis situations; they would not necessarily wait for the directions from above. The employees would also be more adept at interacting with clients as also with other streams of their enterprise. The interflow would be more seamless than it ever was. The employees would, of course, be more motivated and updated and would hold the clue in most cases. They would be more adept at invoking sound strategies for the welfare of the company; for the uplifting of relations with clients; for optimizing productivity levels of the company on the whole.
  3. Note these three salient features.
    In a nutshell, you can emphasize and assess the effectiveness on three salient features; confidence level, aptitude, and energy. With these three pointers, the employees feel more full-on to take any event, opportunity, or crisis straight on. They also know that in the event of falling short, they can either take recourse to eLearning modules or undergo a fresh and relevant course. The advantage with the courses is that the instructor is fully aware of the learner’s strength and weakness. For instance, people from India are generally good at math and have to be fed in with theoretical concepts; people from Somalia would have to be taught in basic language, so on and so forth. Another advantage of eLearning courses is that they are dynamic and can easily be tweaked or changed after taking a peek at the learner’s credentials. For instance, if the learner is already at the Intermediate level, the instructor can exalt himself to expert teaching. This is not possible with physical education, where it is necessary to stick to the syllabus. You also have to interpret the significance of audio-visuals. We, as humans, are more likely to absorb the trends through seeing or hearing than through reading texts. Wonderfully crafted videos or podcasts can take learners so much close to grafting the inputs. This leads to confident and well-tuned employees, if you will.
  4. Calculate the Return On Investment (ROI).
    Did you ever try and calculate the ROI after an eLearning course has been successfully deployed? If not, you will never be able to know how much it has impacted your employees. The simplest way to do it is to estimate all the associated costs of the eLearning, starting from development until deployment and then measuring it against the benefits that you have received, for instance, improved productivity levels, increased sales, fewer complaints from your customers, etc. When you perform this exercise, you will easily get a cost-to-performance ratio that will help you in determining if the training was effective for your employees.