Evaluation & Improvement

Once you’ve developed and deployed your first eLearning program, you may want to breathe a sigh of relief and relax a bit, but don’t forget that evaluation is the key to a strong program. The Evaluation phase serves as the quality management component of training development. During this phase, the organization ensures that the course functions as designed through evaluations with actual end users. Surveys and questionnaires address training issues such as:

• Did users like the instructional experience?
• Did the users achieve the stated goals of the instruction?
• Were users able to transfer what they learned in class to the real world?
• Was there any long-term return on investment from the instructional experience?

The answers to these questions will allow the instructional designer to perform two critical functions:

1. Certify that learning has actually occurred as result of the instructional experience.
2. Identify gaps in student performance that need to be addressed with additional training or enhancement and modification of existing content.

The importance of evaluation cannot be overstated. Through evaluation, the results and lessons learned from user feedback can be captured and distilled. By analyzing these results, action plans can be defined to inform future course development efforts. Whatever the situation may be, you should have a summative evaluation plan to ensure that you collect the data you need to assess the overall effectiveness of your eLearning program.

Evaluating eLearning is no different than evaluating any other form of training. The following steps are a guide to how to evaluate and further improve your eLearning experience.

Step 1: Involve Everyone
Evaluation should be an essential part of the process for all those involved with the eLearning program. Learners want to see how they have improved, as do their managers, so both learners and managers should be actively involved in the entire eLearning process. If everyone involved can see and quantify the benefits of eLearning, then learners are more likely to come back for more.

Step 2: Evaluate the Medium and Levels of Retention
Don’t just focus on performance improvements, but test learner acceptance of the medium and quantify any improvement in retention. Such information will be important as you propose further uses of eLearning. This information is also important if you are trying to show that eLearning leads to a greater performance improvement than other methods of training.

Step 3: Use Push Technology
Learning management systems are a worthwhile investment because they provide many opportunities to measure effectiveness. From “pushing” happy sheets down the line to the user based on completion of a course to setting assignments and more qualitative evaluations at regular intervals afterwards, you can truly begin to capture effectiveness data on an ongoing basis. Using 360-degree survey tools will also facilitate the collection of information.

Step 4: Follow Best Practices
Ensure that best practices are followed for all eLearning activities, with managers meeting with their staff to ensure that the learning opportunity is not wasted. Managers should be guided to determine the success factors for each training event, assisting in the collation and recording of meaningful data that means something at the business level. Using training best practices will also help to improve the chances of success.

Step 5: Collect Anecdotal Evidence Electronically
Instead of just passing on comments heard in the corridor, create a newsgroup on the corporate intranet where learners and their managers can record their success stories. Perhaps introduce a competition that rewards the most effective training event from those recorded.

Assessment and evaluation are usually focused on learners. This type of meta-evaluation is required to make sure that user comments and experiences are incorporated into continual improvement and development of course resources. Additionally, by using best practices and design standards from other organizations, eLearning programs can be strengthened and improved based on the experiences of others.

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