How To Track The Effectiveness Of Your Responsive eLearning Course Using xAPI
Today’s organizations are beginning to realize the potential of building data-driven learning programs, making it crucial to know what information you should be collecting from learners. Being able to use your own mobile learning tools to collect data from learners who are becoming increasingly more mobile is just one way to help stay on top of emerging trends in the organization’s own analytics. This helps businesses to create personalized programs for optimum results.
Why is learning analytics such a hot topic at the moment? Organizations worldwide have reached a tipping point in the way that they create learning content for their audiences. Armed with detailed learner analytics, they can then think about exactly why their learners may be struggling with content, and come up with a solution to help them improve their performance.
Using Mobile Learning Tools
More and more of today’s eLearning is created to be mobile accessible. With workplaces becoming more agile and flexible, and audiences needing to be able to access content wherever they are, modern mobile learning tools give companies the benefit of being able to create, distribute and track content through a single product. Keeping analytics together with the content created in-house gives L&D teams a full overview of how people are performing – at every point along their eLearning journey. Imagine a scenario where you can only monitor learning on desktop computers...
You could be missing out on a valuable piece of the puzzle from everyone who accesses learning on their smartphones or tablets whenever they are on the move.
What Data Should You Collect?
Some older mobile learning tools may not collect any data at all, or it may not be especially meaningful. The latest mobile learning tools allow users to automatically gather learning analytics for use by L&D teams as well as the larger organization, with a wealth of information available to help you better understand your learners and how they’re performing. For example, being able to pinpoint specific questions where learners are struggling can be vital to the overall failure or success of a learning program. To be able to drill down into your learning data to discover, for example, that learners in a particular country are bringing down the average score, gives the opportunity to probe these learners to find out what extra support they need. In this example, the solution may be that the program is only provided in English, and one office has many second-language speakers who would perform better with translated or localized content. 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 in your organization.
Achieving Results
The more data you have about your learners, the more effective and efficient you will be at helping them achieve their personal ambitions and the goals of the company. You should think of the learning analytics process as a cycle – the data you collect should inform your next revision of the content. The data from this revision should then be analyzed and should feed into the next version. If this process continues, you should notice a marked difference in the performance of your learners.
The key to achieving success through learning analytics is to create fully customized programs. A one-size-fits-all approach will not be nearly as effective as one which has been carefully crafted based on an ongoing stream of detailed learning analytics.
What’s The Difference Between Experience API And SCORM?
SCORM (or Sharable Content Object Reference Module) is a collection of standards and specifications behind eLearning courses. It’s basically the metaphorical green light that allows any SCORM LMS to play SCORM eLearning courses. It also does some high-level tracking, such as time lapsed, score, completion rate and pass/fail rate. To some eLearning professionals, it sounds quite basic, but it’s only in recent times that we have needed much more than that. It was, after all, just a few years ago that we were still producing eLearning for one screen size and one device type.
Experience API (or Tin Can/xAPI) is the new standard of tracking which takes elearning reporting to a whole new level, one which suits our current, always-on workforce.
This provides you with the ability to track all devices (desktop, plus mobile and tablets) across an entire 7 Using xAPI to track the effectiveness of your responsive elearning courseblend – tracking basically anything you need to. With so much more data available to help us determine the true effectiveness of a course, Experience API has the ability to inform strategic decisions and show us what people know (and more importantly, what they don’t), while transforming learning design.
Experience API Tracking Across Devices
Unlike SCORM, Experience API was designed with mobile in mind, which greatly simplifies the ability to track learning across all devices. xAPI allows for a single learning activity to be tracked across multiple devices as standard, allowing you to see when learners switched from smartphone to desktop.
Experience API allows us to think outside of the restraints we’ve become used to with SCORM. Depending on the job role and industry, there are many scenarios which require learners to visit physical locations, speak to their colleagues, scan equipment, capture photo and video and much more. Experience API allows us to capture the whole ‘bigger picture’ experience.
Tracking Activities With Experience API
If you’re used to tracking SCORM, it’s difficult to imagine a world where reading an online article or chatting to a colleague can contribute to an instance of reporting.
Of course, it’s obvious that learners will regularly turn to the Internet and those around them for support, but we are so used to thinking in such a linear fashion that it’s refreshing to consider that we can analyze the full picture of learning and development.
Experience API reports in a similar fashion to a social networking site like Facebook or LinkedIn, which shows activities such as posting a picture, liking an article or sharing a link. Put together, these streams tell a story of what we’ve been doing. When it comes to learning, the sequencing of events can be really interesting. For example, if you see that a lot of learners are failing, speaking to a co-worker, watching a YouTube video and then passing, you can track the pattern of how staff are working to improve their performance.
Learning Analytics
There are a lot of reasons why organizations are yet to make the jump to Experience API, but while we’re waiting for mass uptake, learning analytics, in many organizations, remains a fairly overlooked aspect of learning technologies. Experience API gives us so much data that we can not only begin to easily understand the effectiveness of a course, but we can use it to focus and refine future initiatives. Using 7 Using xAPI to track the effectiveness of your responsive elearning courselearning analytics data effectively allows us to target and then retarget weaknesses.
It’s great to consider that Experience API will allow us to fully understand the 70% of learning which takes place outside of formal learning environments. Of course, there’s still a clear role of the course and the LMS, but in order to stay relevant, both must become a part in the larger learning network – it would be naive to assume that we can provide better learning and development by simply building more and more courses and adding them to a learning library.
Experience API On The Ground
As the demand for xAPI grows, so will the demand for truly multi-device courses and native apps, as more complex interactions are tracked to benefit personal development. Highly customized reporting will require the input of a developer to build tracking and reporting tools, but you’re not going to want people taking pictures, tweeting and wandering around with every course.
The latest version of gomo authoring tool outputs multi-device, Experience API-ready learning content, whilst gomo’s built-in hosting and analytics allows you to analyze its effectiveness through a realtime dashboard. This makes the once-onerous task of reporting quicker and easier, and helps L&D departments prove the value of their learning programs to senior management.
If you want to know more about responsive eLearning courses, download the free eBook Fluid & Future-Proof: How To Create And Distribute A Responsive eLearning Course.
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