Every organization has its own set of goals, unique methodology, and a particular way of using their LMS to serve learners and provide training. Because of this, it’s important that you choose the right analytics when presenting your program to management. The data available to LMS users is expansive and highly-detailed, so the best analytics-based presentations always have a game-plan, that makes sure only the most persuasive and relevant data is used. For example, there’s little value in presenting data on the potential for course expansion, if your organization is focused on internal restructuring - no matter how impressive the numbers might be.
One way of ensuring that your analytics are representative is to ask yourself fundamental questions, like what would my perfect data look like? Envisioning your ideal data set will help you in building a mental picture of your overall analytics project. It may also optimize your data-gathering by focusing your efforts on the most valuable outcomes.
In our instructional webinar How to be a Data Viz Whiz - Finding the View for You we cover the best practices to follow and tools to utilize for clean, intuitive presentation of your learning analytics insights.
Another useful question is to ask who exactly you are presenting to. Knowing your audience helps make better business decisions, and greatly increases the chances of adoption when pitching analytics, as personal information allows you to select the appropriate data at the appropriate level of complexity.
A great way to exhibit your data is through visual presentations, which allow audiences to immediately recognize the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) related to your business.
What Are The Most Important KPIs for LMS eLearning? This article will help you avoid the vanity metrics and focus on measuring what really matters.
Dashboards, created by LMS learning analytics software, are fantastic for presenting real-time information on your programs, making you the authority on successes, trends, and problem areas. They help to show that you and your team are intimately aware of all aspects of your current activities.
Using a Dashboard Designer to create your analytics-based management pitches puts interactive, drilled-downed information directly on the table. From this, teams are able to increase the productivity and value of their conversations and strategy meetings, which translates into increased trust, confidence, and potential buy-in.
Style, grace, easy understanding - we'll show you how to have it all in this video session : The Season for Reason - The Principles of Dashboard Design.
Dashboards also allow automated data reporting, which means that management can continue to access the latest data on successfully-pitched projects. Because reports and dashboards can be embedded directly into your LMS, they expand their usefulness beyond pitching, to become an everyday tool for educators.
Similarly, analytics are not only useful for pitching new ideas and programs, but for showing returns on investments. Learning analytics software is able to continually collect learning data across entire timelines, which means that educators are able to gain insights that go far beyond single data points. When it comes to using this capability for ROI presentations, LMS users can easily present data across whatever incremental period is most appropriate for wider business objectives. For example, presenting on returns for a quarterly meeting is easily achieved by gathering weekly or fortnightly analytics. This is a great way of presenting trends, and thinking about future actions. On the other hand, isolating certain data is great for drilling into specific aspects of learning. Take the following examples available through learning analytics:
Ready to keep climbing down the Learning Analytics rabbit hole? Here’s what we’ve got for you: