Due to COVID-19, working from home has become the new normal for many employees. The Hartford Courant reported that a variety of major employers in Connecticut plan to keep employees working from home through 2020 during the coronavirus crisis.1 Other companies like Facebook are extending the work-from-home policy well into 2021.2
Since employees are working from home, they are also training from home. Some companies have moved all of their employee training programs online to accommodate workers’ new remote training needs. These organizations must make it a point to regularly measure the effectiveness of their remote training programs to achieve maximum return on investment and increase performance.
Is your organization’s remote training program achieving the objectives your team set forth when creating it? Here are some tips for measuring the effectiveness of any corporate online learning program:
1.Measure remote training effectiveness with xAPI
Are you familiar with xAPI, or Tin Can API? xAPI was developed by Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative as a successor to SCORM certification to advance the usability of data relating to learners’ experiences across platforms and applications. Standardization allows for the creation of Learning Record Stores (LRS), a standalone service.
One of the best ways to track the effectiveness of training is by utilizing your online learning platform’s xAPI feature. xAPI via LRS can capture, report, and share user records in a way that makes them compatible for use with different systems. User records can be analyzed to determine how well learners are adopting an online employee training program. According to TrainingIndustry.com, “Unlike SCORM, a Tin Can API can track learning experiences outside the LMS environment... Tin Can is able to comprehensively track learning, whether formal or informal.”3
Related Reading: Increase Employee Engagement with LMS Compliance Training
2. Measure remote training effectiveness with Kirkpatrick's 4 Levels of Evaluation
The process of measuring the impact of training is smoother when standards of effectiveness are observed. These standards will give your team a solid idea of what training effectiveness means to your company. For example, Kirkpatrick’s 4 Levels of Evaluation can be very helpful to teams assessing the impact of a remote training program. “You can use it to objectively analyze the impact of training, to work out how well your team members learned, and to improve their learning in the future,” stated MindTools.4
Kirkpatrick’s 4 Levels of Evaluation encompass the reaction learners have to the training, what trainees did and didn’t learn in training, how well learners applied training, and what type of results the training delivered to the company. This method may be especially worthwhile to companies that want to measure the effectiveness of employee training using more than just traditional KPIs, such as attendance tracking, skill assessment, and completion rates.
3. Measure remote training effectiveness with LMS reporting
Tin Can API isn’t the only LMS feature designed to help administrators measure the impact of online employee training. Like xAPI, LMS reporting is helpful to teams that are curious about how well learners are adopting training and applying it in the workplace.
LMS reporting features give administrators quick access to reports from their LMS. Intuitive learning management systems enable company leaders to easily navigate and make sense of these reports which contain data such as user activity and performance. This data allows you to “...gauge the effectiveness of your training and custom tailor it to meet the needs of your employees,” explained eLearning Industry.5 “For example, if you find that most of your employees are taking much longer to progress through a module than expected, you may want to assess its difficulty level to see whether it's too challenging.”
Related Reading: 4 Ways to Use LMS Reports that Businesses Don’t Know About.
Use a Learning Management System to Manage Remote Training
Managing remote training can be a challenge. This is especially true if a company has a large employee base. But even for small or mid-sized companies, creating, distributing, tracking, and reporting on remote training is not an easy task. A learning management system (LMS) can help. With an LMS, organizations can create an online learning experience that is highly social, which remote employees will appreciate. And LMS features such as reporting, analytics, and xAPI make measuring the effectiveness of remote training simpler.
Interested in managing remote training the easy way in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis? Check out our Quick Start Program or request an LMS Demo of the TOPYX platform.
Sources:
[1] https://www.courant.com/coronavirus/hc-news-coronavirus-connecticut-employers-return-to-offices-20200810-qwvdxduvyramzohgwysymf4kky-story.html
[2] https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/354501
[3] https://trainingindustry.com/articles/learning-technologies/tin-can-or-scorm-which-will-prevail-in-2018/
[4] https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/kirkpatrick.htm
[5] https://elearningindustry.com/8-tips-to-measure-your-online-training-effectiveness