Using LMS reporting to improve the impact of online learning

November 22, 2021 By Moodle

Tamara Smith, People & Culture Manager at Moodle HQ

Over the past few years, the importance of workplace learning as a mechanism for attracting and retaining great talent, as well as accomplishing business goals, has become increasingly apparent. As a result, learning & development professionals are more than ever before being charged with the goal of building a culture of learning within their workplaces, with a particular focus on online learning. 

In 2020, L&D professionals worldwide reported a 57% increase in their time spent on developing online learning. Naturally, with this increased investment in time (and money), also comes both the requirement to measure online learning’s overall return on investment, as well as the imperative to continuously improve online learning programs.  Measuring the value that learning brings to organisations becomes even more critical as workforces transition to remote or hybrid work environments. 

In their 2021 Workplace Learning Report1 LinkedIn asked L&D professionals worldwide the ways in which they measure the impact of learning.  Included in the top 10 responses were measures such as “satisfaction of employees using online courses”, “the number of employees that constantly engage with learning content” and “the number of online courses completed.” So it is clear that any learning management system you use to manage your online learning activities, needs to have the ability to provide this type of data.  

Fortunately, if your LMS has the right reporting capabilities, you can easily configure and automate reports to measure many of these types of metrics, build custom reports to obtain the insights you need to improve the impact of online learning in your organisation, as well as share them with relevant stakeholders.

At Moodle HQ, our People & Culture team use a range of reports to assist with improving the impact of the learning experiences we conduct through our Moodle Workplace site.

 

1. Course completion and progress reports for our onboarding course

With a fully distributed workforce based across 17 countries, the onboarding process at Moodle HQ is a crucial component in setting new team members up for success. As part of this process, we created a “how we do things around here” course, where we provide new starters with all the information they need around the ways we work and collaborate, as well as the culture of Moodle.

It’s important for us to know that new starters are completing the course, so we regularly run completion reports to ensure that part of their onboarding is finalised. We also periodically run progress reports, as it gives us the chance to easily detect and reach out to new starters who are not making the progress we like to see with the course, to ensure all is going well and encourage them to complete it.

 

2. Time reports to inform course design

Looking at the time that it takes team members to complete an activity within a course, or the course itself, provides us insights into our content and course design. 

For example, if a significant number of team members complete a course quicker than expected, we might look at redesigning the course into a more interactive experience, as well as adding activities to prove knowledge between different course sections. On the other hand, if people are spending more time on courses than we anticipated, we can easily see which activities took longer to complete and edit or redesign them to make them more user friendly.


Moodle Internal badgeseries MoodleCultureChamp HQ

The badge we issue for the members of our Culture Champs group

3. Badge and certificate reports to identify skills

At Moodle HQ, we use badges to recognise our team’s accomplishments and skills -which people can display on their profiles on our site. Badge reports can be a great quick reference for our team to find a trained team member when the team has specific needs. 


4. Course participation reports (Forum interaction)

When it comes to course participation, a metric we find useful to look at is engagement with our discussion forums in our ‘All Hands’ course.  This course is a series of forums relating to a wide range of topics. Course participation reports, particularly in this situation relating to forum activity, provide us with an understanding of which topics of discussion are more relevant to our team.  We can see who participates in the forums and who doesn’t, and then try to find ways to engage those who don’t participate as much. Listening to all voices at Moodle HQ is important to us, so customising these forums to enable this as much as we can, helps drive team member engagement. 

This is just a small sample of the types of reports Moodle Workplace can generate!

In summary, reports generated by your LMS enable powerful insights into your learning activities, help you track skills development and compliance, and assist you to drive improvements in your learning ecosystem.

 

Moodle Workplace allows you to easily create custom reports in a drag and drop interface with instant preview, as well as automatically share them with the relevant stakeholders. 

Book a demo with our team today.

 

 

1https://learning.linkedin.com/resources/workplace-learning-report