How to check the effectiveness of your online training program?
After the pandemic, online training has come to the forefront. The corporate sector is incorporating advanced technology that can help deliver the best online training to its employees. Online training is going to stay for a long time now as organizations have realized the immense advantages that online training can offer.
The transition from offline to online training has brought tremendous changes in the training landscape. The creation of online training material, its distribution, carrying assessments, providing certification, etc, have all undergone a huge transformation.
As such a major shift is taking place, mere delivery of eLearning content isn’t sufficient. As an organization, you should keep a gauge on the effectiveness of your online training programs as well. If the employee needs to acquire the best skill by making use of eLearning courses, then as an organization it is your responsibility to deploy the best eLearning courses and material on the eLearning platform.
The following are how you can check the effectiveness of online training programs-
- Online assessments-
Every training is incomplete without assessment. An assessment is a process of measuring and evaluating learning outcomes. It is the most important pillar in the training process. This is because-
- It helps online instructors to know how much and how far learners have understood.
- It also gives insights to online instructors about how much they’ve failed and succeeded in providing training.
- It helps you to identify and address learning gaps.
- It is useful in making quantitative data (marks or scores) to improve quality in training.
- It is also helpful in building a learning graph for learners and keeping track and record of their performance with time.
- Performance goals-
Performance goals are yet another way to check the effectiveness of your online training program. You can simply draw comparisons between the past and present performance of the employee. You should also have an understanding of what all skills do the employees possessed before the start of the online training program. This way you will be able to see what extra has been done by the employee. The online training needs to be empowered by online training assignments, and eLearning projects that can help you in assessing their performance.
- Built-in analytics-
A learning management system is equipped with built-in analytics that helps you to monitor and analyze the frequent usage of your eLearning platform.
For instance, using this feature you see how frequently the online instructors and employees engage with the eLearning platform, whether online assessments are being taken up by the employees, and whether employees are making use of the eLearning materials and modules stored in the online digital library or not. By doing this you can easily understand if employees are facing issues related to training.
- Feedback-
If, as an organization, you are into taking feedback from the employees about the online training program, then this shows that you care for the employees. Through feedback, you can understand where the problem in online training lies. For instance, if your SaaS learning management system isn’t mobile device compatible, then this might be troubling employees a lot and they may be hesitant to convey you the same. But by asking for feedback you can understand all problems the employees are facing in learning.
You should always be open to accepting all sorts of critical feedback and reviews from employees. You should take it positively and try to improve.
- Engagement-
This is the best and most important way to know how good your online training programs are. If your eLearning content or modules stored in the online digital library aren’t updated and engaging, then the employee may feel disconnected. Sometimes, the mode of instruction, especially the language might be acting as a barrier in online training. Standardized assessments and lack of use of technology may disengage employees too.
To make sure that the engagement level is well maintained, you can use gamification features to make your online training more fun. Game elements such as badges, points, virtual coins, trophies, and leaderboards can boost the morale of employees. Once a competitive spirit is instilled in them, there are higher chances of increased engagement levels.
Another way of increasing engagement is to employ social learning tools that can give them a sense of community feeling. Discussion forums, personal chat space, etc are the best ways to promote social interaction among employees.
Conclusion-
With technological advancement, there will develop more ways to test the effectiveness of your online training programs. You can also create your own KPIs (key performance indicators) to check the effectiveness of your training.
