Leverage Reports In TalentLMS For Better Training Analysis
One of the great, but often overlooked, benefits of going digital, is the ease with which you can not only conduct your business (e.g. teaching, selling), but measure it too.
With computer systems, all user actions can be stored, analyzed and queried by administrators. This can be a bad thing, for example, if you are consumer whose web habits are being analyzed by Google to show you more ads. But it can also be a great thing, in any kind of enterprise setting, as it allows you to better understand your users, their needs, and progress.
Case in point, eLearning and online training. They are not just faster to deploy, simpler to scale, and more cost-effective versions of traditional classroom-based training, they are also easier to keep tabs on and know how your learners and training program are doing.
In TalentLMS, this functionality comes in the form of a powerful, but still simple to use, reporting engine, that allows you to have complete insight of your training portal, from the macro- to the micro- level.
In this article, we’ll explore how you can leverage Reports in TalentLMS to analyze your training program, improve what needs improving, and keep upper management happy with pretty charts and tables.
Why Use Reports?
The utility of reporting tools in an eLearning platform might not make immediate sense, especially for smaller companies.
After all, you can get a good sense of your learners’ progress from their grades and overall performance, so why would you need a special subsystem for this?
Of course, as soon as the number of learners increases, or you are having to manage and deal with multiple groups of learners, across different departments, etc, the utility of a dedicated Reporting toolset becomes immediately obvious.
What TalentLMS’ reporting tools bring to the table is the freedom to slice and dice all kind of eLearning-related data from your training portal and mobile clients, and get separate summaries, listings, and graphs for different groups of learners, and from different perspectives (from "how many users are enrolled in this class", to "how many certificates of type X were awarded during this period").
Courses, Users, Branches, Groups, Certificates, Tests, and Surveys can all be the starting point of your analysis, and you have the option to further refine each report with additional filtering criteria, like a specific data range.
Reports In TalentLMS
TalentLMS’ reporting tools can be found in the, you’ve guessed it, "Reports" page.The default view when you enter this page gives you some general statistics on the left and a set of different Reports categories in a sidebar on the right.
The general statistics include things like the number of active users, number of courses assigned, number of logins, and number of course completions. All in all, pretty high level, but handy stuff to know. And the great part is that these standard numbers, along with everything else that you can imagine about your portal, are exportable in Excel formats, as well, giving you the option to share the status with stakeholders.
The Report categories on the sidebar include: User Reports, Course Reports, Branch Reports, Group Reports, SCORM Reports, Test Reports, Survey Reports, Assignment Reports, and, last but not least, Custom Reports.
Yeah, that’s a whole lot of reports. But the total tally gets even bigger when you realize that those report categories are just the starting points, and that each category includes several different reports and statistics, and that you can even drill down further to customize what you see.
Clicking on the "User Reports" category, for example, you can select a specific user, and see reports on their Logins, Courses, Certifications, and Timeline, a whole list of actions and events related to the user.
The various Report categories all have several things in common as to how they work:
- All allow you to define the reporting period that you are interested in. There are some predefined periods like "Today" (default), "Yesterday", "Week", "Month", "Year", but you can also set an arbitrary custom start and end date.
- All are interconnected and allow you to drill-down or click on links to go to related information. For example, when viewing a Certificates report, you can click to see the users that passed that certification or click to view the Certificate’s details, etc.
- All give you the option to narrow down what you see with special filters (e.g. on a user listing, to find users with a specific name).
- Last, but not least, all give you the option to export the reported data in the Excel (and database) friendly CSV format, to analyze them further, include them in your ERP, load them in your OLAP database, or do anything else with them that will be useful.
For TalentLMS "Plus" plans and higher, there is also the ability for users to create Custom Reports containing only the specific items or activities that they need to track. Those are very easy to create using TalentLMS’ rule-based configuration engine. Finally, with Custom Reports, users have the ability to add, remove and reorder columns, and even use their own custom user profile fields.
Since most reports end up with a listing (or matching Courses, Users, etc), another time-saving option is the ability to perform mass actions on all items of the list (e.g. mass enroll all users to a course, add them to a branch, etc). Note that this is available only when you’re working with Custom reports.
TalentLMS will even let administrators schedule Reports to be created on specified days and have them automatically be sent by email to the desired recipients, like people in upper management who want to stay ahead of what’s going on in the training program.
Reports In TalentLMS: The Gist
Information is power, and Reports in TalentLMS put all the information you need about your training program at your fingertips.
With numerous built-in types, Reports in TalentLMS are easy to get started with, while giving you the power you need to go deeper, especially if you leverage the flexibility of Custom Reports.
