With budgets being tight, one of the most significant challenges for any company is to provide effective feedback to its learners on their eLearning progress.
Additionally, companies also struggle with receiving feedback from learners on course completeness and quality, and this leads to poorer outcomes for both teachers and learners alike. The good news, however, is that there are a number of ways to streamline and automate the process of feedback, and these steps improve your ROI while increasing learner engagement.
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If your company wants to have a formalized review process, here are five efficient steps to streamline your training evaluation process and measure ROI:
1. Lay the Groundwork
Get everyone on board
To benefit from this change, you should get everyone in your company involved with the delivery of eLearning feedback. This includes managers, IT staff, HR staff, and management teams. The more people involved in collecting feedback and reviewing it, the better information and evaluation there will be.
This can also help you identify subtle trends which may be beneficial for managing your training program moving forward. It is important to have a consistent structure for all employees when giving feedback so that they know what to expect from each question when answering it.
To simplify the process, here are the some essential questions to consider during this phase:
- What is the desired learning outcome of your training?
- What are the benefits of achieving this desired learning outcome?
- What do you want your trainees to be able to do at the end of their training?
- How will you know they are successful?
- How does this contribute to your business objectives?
- What is our intended ROI for this training?
- How will we measure ROI?
Understanding the answers to these questions will enable you to create a strong, robust feedback system that empowers both learners and teachers.
Review everything beforehand
We often find that, during every course review, there are almost always gaps in knowledge and tutelage that the teacher takes for granted. It’s difficult to put yourself in the shoes of your learners, but being able to do so effectively is vital to developing strong training programs. Reviews help consolidate and streamline your course so that they’re understood by everyone, regardless of knowledge background.

2. Focus on Participation
It’s difficult to have accurate and useful evaluations of learner success if you don’t engage the participants with quantifiable participation. Students who participate actively in forums, discussion boards, quizzes, discussions, etc, are more likely to remember information, if compared with those who passively watch videos or read text passages for long periods. This results in improved quality and understanding of the training program material and also gives you measurable benchmarks by which to monitor progress.
Here are some tips on how to engage participants in the process and get them to provide thoughtful evaluations:
- Publish the course in parts, and collect evaluations after each part. A course delivered over time is much more manageable than one massive project.
- Try and utilize participation forums – discussion boards that provide a centralized place to talk about course materials and contents. Provide extra marks for active participation in such forums, and score learners on their accuracy and understanding.
- Frequently and consistently test, quiz, and examine learners during projects that prove real-world application of the knowledge learned in the class.
- Offer the opportunity for in-person feedback, recognizing that learners will have differing views on feedback because they all have different interpersonal styles.
- Establish clear guidelines for the feedback process.
3. Provide Incentives for Feedback
Generally, you should provide an opportunity to engage participants and make it easy for them to provide feedback. At times, corporate training programs may need to take it a step further and actually incentivize learners to provide feedback for the betterment of the course. There are numerous examples of how companies can offer specific incentives for participants who offer feedback on their training course, like non-monetary awards, bonuses, or other gifts that they value highly but wouldn’t normally receive while simply doing their jobs.
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Don’t forget to get creative in this area! Depending on your industry and type of participant, you can offer rewards like free movie tickets, vacations, or company swag for goals reached. The list is endless, and there are plenty of valuable incentives for getting participants to complete their feedback on your training.
4. Automate Feedback
Such software is usually built right into most modern eLearning training platforms, and will allow you to monitor participant progress directly via their work and will also allow you to send automated notifications about certain milestones and achievements. It is important to collect this feedback before participants leave the course, graduate from your training program, or move on to the next level. Automating feedback can make it timelier and more relevant, and evaluating or collecting feedback from participants when it is fresh usually results in higher quality outcomes.
5. Analyze your data
Measure Expectations vs. ROI
Analyze Qualitative Data
Take advantage of qualitative data by asking participants and instructors open-ended questions about their experience with the eLearning module after it has been completed.
Gather information about attitudes towards the company, as well as information about participants’ perceptions about whether or not they learned something new from completing the eLearning module (qualitative).
Make Note of Data Trends
Streamline Your Training Evaluation Process
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By following these five secrets to streamlining your training evaluation process, you can be assured your training program is effective and produces the intended results.
Action Points
This will allow you to start with a local benchmark, to engage with other potential stakeholders within your organization and also to build on any existing best practices.
This is the sixth of 8 articles from the eBook eLearning 101 - How To Create The Perfect Curriculum For Your Company.
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This article was first published on eLearning Industry.