Focus on feedback: How to effectively evaluate your eLearning
As the world shifts towards digital learning environments, the importance of evaluating the effectiveness of eLearning has become more significant than ever before. One of the key ways to evaluate eLearning is through feedback. Feedback helps educators and trainers to understand how learners perceive the course material, what aspects they find helpful, and what changes need to be made to enhance their learning experience. In this blog, we will explore the importance of feedback in eLearning, discuss various methods of collecting feedback, and provide insights on how to use feedback to create a more engaging and effective online learning experience. So, join us as we delve into the world of eLearning feedback and discover how it can help you to improve your online courses.
Importance Of Feedback In eLearning
Here are some predominant points that highlight the essentiality of feedback in eLearning:
It Enables Consistent Improvement
Real-time feedback enables trainers to constantly improve themselves, ascertain knowledge gaps, and rectify issues. Receiving feedback from learners after the course completion helps you to know what was and wasn’t effective in the content so that you can make alterations accordingly.
It Encourages Learners To Have A Voice
Asking for your learners’ feedback is an excellent means to improve your course. More so, it proves to your learners that you value them and that their opinions and inputs count and matter to you. It helps you get more familiar with your learners and know how to serve them better in subsequent times.
It Eliminates Ineffective Training
Without collecting feedback, it’s only a matter of time before your training becomes ineffective. Notwithstanding the effort you channeled into the course creation, if you don’t have access to your audience’s perception and what they’ll prefer you modify, the course might not receive as much reception as you anticipate. The course might be irrelevant to them, causing you to have a low return on investment.
It Helps You Receive Creative And Unexpected Inputs
Aside from the fact that asking for feedback from your learners exposes you to an ocean of personalities from whom you can tap ideas, it also enables you to have a cross-section of input from individuals in various job functions and departments within your business. Furthermore, with this enormous pool of feedback providers, you might get ideas for new topics you’ve never thought of.
It Helps You To Track Your Improvement Overtime
Receiving feedback helps you to compare and track the improvement you’ve made in the training courses you’ve developed so far. You can create a table or assemble reports to reveal feedback you have obtained every time you create a course and if the feedback has improved after you made necessary modifications.
The Effective Feedback Process
The following are guidelines to help you gather feedback:
Ask Your Learners To Give You Feedback
This may seem obvious, but it needs to be reiterated. You need to ensure you are asking the right people for feedback. To achieve this, your feedback request should come towards the end of the course.
Be Specific About The Kind Of Input You Want From Them
When demanding feedback to evaluate your eLearning, you must be specific about your desires. Generic responses will do you no good. You need responses that will help you make apparent modifications if necessary. Being specific with your request lets you get the detailed feedback you need, eliminating uncertainty or confusion.
Set A Time-Frame For It
This is expedient for many reasons. People tend to procrastinate over an event that has no deadline. When you set a deadline, they know that for their input to count, they need to forward it before the set deadline. In addition, demanding feedback for a course people took the previous year is synonymous with demanding lies. So many things have happened between the time they took the course and the time you are asking for feedback. Your learners will most likely not have concrete feedback like they would if you had asked immediately when they completed the course. In all honesty, their responses might be vague due to the time.
Utilize The Received Feedback And Act Accordingly
After collating the feedback, it is expedient that you address it. You must take actionable steps to improve the areas complained about and incorporate the modifications into the course.
Questions You Can Include In Your eLearning Feedback Form
Here are some sample questions to aid you in receiving feedback
6 Sample Questions About The Training Structure
- Was the content too long or short? Do you think any section needs adjustment?
- Was there any specific part that needed improvement?
- Would you want to delete any section of this content? Why?
- Would you want to include any section in the content? Why?
- If you had your way, would you take this training online or in person?
- Did you get confused while on the training? What part of the training confused you?
7 Sample Questions About The Training Quality
- On a 1-10 scale, how well could you maximize this training? What stood out for you? What did you take from it?
- Were you confused about any of the training sessions? Why?
- What section of the training content was most helpful to you?
- After completing the course, did you feel more confident?
- If you could, would you modify the content to improve it?
- If you had the chance, would you recommend this course to people?
- Do you want to complain about anything regarding the course?
Your corporate or organizational eLearning simply is not working. It is falling flat, and you are unsure of why. You have followed all the best practices in your course design, but your learners simply are not engaged, and they are not taking value from it. Plus, they are resistant to even completing your eLearning at this point.
What is the problem?
Well, the problem could be based on any number of reasons, from the actual design of the course, to technological barriers.
Regardless of the specific reason, the only way to truly discern what is gone awry is to utilize feedback from the people who know best: your employees.
As with anything, you want to maximize your return on investment with your eLearning, and to do that, you have to be able to effectively gauge what is working and what is not.
Here are a few tips for evaluating your eLearning:
Know Your Goals
Before you can evaluate the effectiveness of your eLearning, you have to be aware of what it is you are trying to achieve. Do you want to improve productivity on the manufacturing floor? Perhaps you want to have a more empowered customer service team.
Regardless of your organization’s individual goals, if you do not have a clear perspective of what they are, you will have no parameters from which to gauge the effectiveness of your eLearning.
By determining your goals and objectives, you can create metrics for measuring success.
Survey Says…
The simplest and best tool you have to evaluate your corporate eLearning is the good old-fashioned survey. Asking employees how they felt about eLearning can help you find areas for improvement, and understand what is going to appeal to your learners.
Motivate your employees to give quality survey answers by directly conveying how their feedback can help improve the learning materials. If necessary, incentivize employees to give accurate and helpful answers.
Along with surveys, you can provide other opportunities for direct employee feedback, including anonymous questionnaires, or virtual suggestion boxes.
When you are asking for employee feedback, be as specific as you can, because effective eLearning is all about the details. Rather than focusing on a broad overview of how employees felt about something, target specific areas you may feel are questionable or problematic. This will give you more fine-tuned perspective to derive actionable information from the feedback process.
Tests and Quizzes
Although the environment is different, eLearning in a corporate setting is very similar to being in school. That means in order to gauge how well information is being taught, you need to assess employees in the form of tests or quizzes.
These are easy to include at the end of an eLearning module, and they are a simple way to see whether or not you are reaching your audience with the information being presented.
As an added bonus, when employees know their eLearning will include a test or quiz, they are more motivated to learn and more likely to retain the information.
Conduct Real-World Evaluations
In addition to tests and quizzes, one of the most effective ways to determine whether or not your eLearning is working is to look at job performance.
This can be viewed through the lens of increased productivity in an industry like manufacturing, or you can conduct random audits for something like customer service. Regardless of how well or poorly an employee performs on a test or quiz, the real measure of eLearning effectiveness lies in how the information is translated to their job.
Although real-world evaluations can be a great way to determine effectiveness of eLearning, it is important to again define clear metrics that can be utilized in a broad way, across a range of employees.
Compare and Contrast
Find ways to compare and contrast the employees who are doing well with the eLearning information, and those employees that seem to be falling short.
By looking at both successes and failings, you can see what the differences and discrepancies are in how the information was received, and address these issues in your course design.
Final Thoughts
At its best, feedback is an effective tool, stimulating improvement and insight on your part and deep reflection from your learners. With the appropriate approach to feedback, you can ensure that your eLearning content meets its objective like those on eLeaP. It’ll also help your learners optimize the content, leading to more remarkable outcomes and better knowledge retention.
Conclusively, gathering feedback helps you to stay on top of the training game. You know what your learners need the most, the efficacy of the content, how satisfied they are with your training style and strategy, and how to deliver better with subsequent courses.