How to Use LMS Analytics to Maximize Learning Outcomes

If the analytics in your LMS overwhelm you, you’re not alone. Many L&Ds struggle to get a clear picture of the success of their learning and development programs. And this inability to prove impact and effectiveness makes it hard to justify more investment in the long term.

It's not as simple as just collecting a handful of numbers. To figure out how your learning programs are really doing, you need to track and pull the correct data and know how to make sense of it all. You'll also need to understand how to translate that data into reports to show clear results—especially since you'll almost certainly be asked to prove ROI on your programs this year.

But you don’t have to be a data analyst to get insights into the ROI of your L&D programs. You can start by pulling a handful of critical data points from your LMS to get a better picture of the impact of your programs. The key is to be intentional about which metrics to keep an eye on. 

With so many metrics to track and analyze, which ones do you choose, and how do you measure and report them?

To drive better results for your L&D teams and learners, go beyond reviewing test scores and analyze these key metrics that track learner progress, engagement, feedback, and L&D’s impact on the organization.

How learning data fuels better decision making

Every modern organization—and every unit within them—strives to make data-driven decisions. Strong data analysis gives you valuable insights into your current learning program, and helps identify real strategies to deliver better results and ROI.

Today, learning management systems include dashboards and visualizations to show you:

• Learner activity and engagement, and how learning content is performing
• Average assessment scores, and your biggest opportunities to improve these if low
• Existing skills gaps at the employee and organizational level, and the best approaches to close these
• Necessary new learning paths and course modules, either self-identified by learners or through AI analytics tools
• Whether employees have attained compliance certificates or completed mandatory training courses
• Predictive, actionable insights into the best areas to place learning resources for the quarters and years ahead

Crucially, as we’ll see, LMS analytics have come a long way. L&Ds who are used to (and perhaps underwhelmed by) traditional LMS data now have real reason to be excited.

To make all of this more practical, let’s look now at the specific data points you can glean from a good learning management system. And in particular, the new wave of detailed insights that can take your learning processes to the next level.

LMS analytics 1.0: Standard metrics

Most platforms provide a range of useful—if limited—metrics and learning analytics to help measure your program’s performance and impact. As we’ll see shortly, the best L&D strategies go beyond these to more fundamental business goals.

The most common LMS analytics features can be bucketed into the following categories.

Learner progress metrics

Learner progress can tell us a lot about the quality and effectiveness of our courses. The most popular of these metrics include:

• Course completion rates. How many of your learners actually finish the courses they start? It's a great indicator of the quality and effectiveness of your content delivery and lets you know if learners connect with the content. 
  
  For non-mandatory courses, a high course completion rate is a clear sign that your learners find value in your courses and that your content delivery is on target. A low course completion rate could mean that your learners are overwhelmed by or losing interest in the material.
• Enrollment and dropout rates. Dropout and enrollment rates reflect how well your courses and topics resonate with learners. If a course has a lot of signups and a high dropout rate, it could mean the subject is attracting interest, but the material isn’t delivering on its promise. You could update the content by making it more interactive using quizzes, or sprinkling in some gamification.
  
  On the other hand, if you see a high number of signups and the dropout rate is low, you’ll know that course is hitting the sweet spot of interest and engagement. If a class is outperforming, it could present an opportunity to create in-depth series on that topic.

These learner progress metrics offer areas for improvement to encourage more students to finish their courses. For example, if a course has a low completion rate, you can employ microlearning to break down the lessons into smaller, more manageable chunks.

Shortening your training sessions can significantly improve learner participation. In one study, 58% of respondents said they would be more likely to use their company’s LMS if it included shorter lessons.

Learner engagement metrics

If you want to keep your learners hooked, you've got to keep them engaged. Making tweaks and improvements based on feedback from a few key user engagement metrics can help you better cater to your learners, resulting in a more enjoyable and impactful learning experience for them.

The most common LMS engagement metrics include:

• Course dropoff rates. While dropout rates display where learners left a course, dropoff rates highlight precisely where they're giving up. This information is crucial to identify weak points in your training, as it reveals the exact areas where modifications will have a more considerable impact.
• Once you pinpoint the places where high numbers of learners drop off, you’ll need to do some investigative work to find out why. This part of the course might be too challenging, tedious, or irrelevant to employee needs. 
• Time-on-task. Time-on-task is the time your employees spend actively digging into specific course content areas. This metric lets you know if they’re actually participating or skimming through the material. 
• High time-on-task numbers suggest your learners are taking the time to digest and synthesize the information, which is a great sign your content is having an impact. Low time-on-task areas may signal that people are getting bored or distracted or that the lesson needs to be simplified.
• Analyzing time-on-task data reveals areas where you can improve engagement, but only if you look at accurate numbers. Since course complexity can skew your findings, look at your time-on-task data in combination with testing results. 

Feedback data

Analyzing learner feedback lets you hear directly from your most valuable asset—your learners. Taking a bottom-up approach to identifying training needs gives your employees the opportunity to tell you exactly what they need to learn to perform better at work.

With 360Learning's powerful feedback features, you can better understand what is and isn’t working, and make necessary changes to improve the overall quality of your courses. This heightened awareness leads to happier, more engaged learners. And studies have shown that employees who feel like their learning needs are being met are 21% more engaged than their counterparts.

• Real-time reactions. Reactions are an integrated feature of 360Learning that boosts engagement through real-time feedback. This enables your learning and development teams to roll out a course, have a specific group of learners review it in real-time to identify improvements, and then re-launch it to more people for further feedback.
  
  This feedback loop helps you release high-quality courses faster and increase your completion rates. Your learners become your beta testers, giving you a chance to spot any stale or incorrect information before it gets distributed to your entire company.
• Relevance scores. 360Learning’s Relevance Score feature empowers your teams to quickly assess the relevance of your courses at the moment of course completion. So you can make meaningful improvements almost immediately.
• When learners complete a course, they’re prompted to give feedback based on how helpful the course was for them. This option gives your learners an easy way to voice their thoughts with a single click, giving L&D teams a more accurate picture of learners’ experiences. A low relevance score signals an opportunity to revisit your course materials to see what needs to be tweaked.

All of the above is certainly helpful and interesting. But where LMS analytics really become impactful, is where they can add strategic insight and truly fuel performance.

LMS analytics 2.0: Measuring business impact

The six metrics above are essentially table stakes. Every modern LMS will offer these. More importantly, they don’t tell the broader story of L&D success.

Here are some more strategic data analytics you should look for in a good LMS platform.

Skills gaps closed

Skills-based learning is now the industry best practice, and a close attention to upskilling and reskilling gives organizations a true competitive advantage.

The ability to identify and close skills gaps is critical—especially where those competencies are deemed essential to the company’s continued performance. And your record of doing this must be a key part of your LMS reporting practice.

Modern learning platforms (like 360Learning) include the tools to both highlight skills gaps, and track them as they’re closed. This LMS data helps illustrate the clear return on investment your program provides, as the company future-proofs itself for modern ways of working.

Time to productivity

Onboarding has always been a core element and focus of L&D programs. A lot of initiatives (rightly) focus on learning the company culture, meeting colleagues, and fitting in. All worthwhile and important. But there’s also the critical aspect of preparing an employee to deliver real value to the company.

“Time to productivity” measures how long it takes new employees to get up to speed and really produce. The shorter, the better, provided you’re not cutting corners and providing a lousy user experience.

It’s not always easy to determine when an employee is truly “productive.” But you could use that skills-based methodology again and measure the time it takes for them to display the necessary skills in their role.

You define what a fully onboarded employee looks like in each role, and then deliver programs to get them there faster.

Employee retention rates

Your LMS in itself won’t monitor employee retention. But with the right integrations to your HRIS or payroll platform, you can easily connect L&D with overall HR performance.

Suppose your company has a clear goal to reduce employee turnover. You then create specific initiatives within L&D to help the company towards this aim. That could include revamped employee onboarding (including preboarding), better managerial training, and highly personalized learning paths that respond to each employee’s needs.

Tying carefully crafted learning strategy to a tangible increase in employee retention rates is one of the strongest proof points for the value of L&D. Perhaps only bettered by the following one.

Increased revenue

Can an L&D team really drive new revenue for the business? This sounds a bit far fetched, but leading L&Ds are successfully delivering exactly that. The result is a powerful narrative that shows the impact your program is having, which means more executive buy-in and increased resources.

Examples of revenue-focused learning paths include:

• Pricing negotiation training for sales teams to increase deal sizes and close deals faster
• Upselling practice for customer success departments
• Conversion optimization courses for marketing and growth teams
• Hackathons and internal team-based events to find and launch new revenue streams

The key is to directly link these initiatives with the positive revenue results they drive. If, after your pricing negotiation training, average deal sizes increase for trained salespeople, that’s an incredible result.

What could be more appealing to the C-Suite than learning programs that actually drive revenue?

Compliance certificates earned

Compliance attainment is an easy one to measure, because it tends to be “yes” or “no.” If you need employees to have earned particular health and safety or legal credentials in their corporate training, it makes sense to keep track.

This might actually be an example of course completion rates as a high-value metric. The company specifically needs these certificates—in many industries they’re mandatory. So actively track them and show how your L&D efforts have helped the company reach its required compliance level.

Unlock L&D’s true potential with the right LMS

All of the metrics and insights above are completely attainable—with the right learning management system. The goal is to have these readily available and easy to understand, without needing complex operations or involving your data team.

To do this, you simply need the right LMS. Choose a platform that puts data analysis and strategic L&D first, while also delivering a great learning experience for teams.

360Learning’s comprehensive LMS analytics and tracking features give you all the data you need to evaluate and optimize your learning programs. With real-time insights into learner progress, engagement, and satisfaction, you get all the data you need to make more informed decisions to deliver the best L&D programs possible.