In a web-based training environment, once students have finished going through their online course material and have successfully completed their related course assessments, what's next? Offering a "Certificate of Completion" is a great first step and motivator for the learner and offers something tangible declaring their training success.
Your Learning Management System (LMS) should give students the option to print their own or have them printed by the training staff and forwarded post-class. The completion certificate can also be a valuable addition to an employee's file of accomplishments and training history.
Also, once courses are complete, training managers can create post-class discussion groups for designated courses in an integrated collaboration tool, such as a live chat room / posting option or an asynchronous blog. These tools link the learners to the organization and learning material and create an additional opportunity for an instructor or subject matter expert to field questions, comments and ideas.
Additionally, your post-class activities can include ad hoc reporting, quantifying test results in numbers and graphs and comparing actual completion scores with required scores per course and per test.
The value of student feedback
Next, evaluating the reach and effectiveness of your online training courses is a true measure of success, and a key element to your e-learning system is the ability to automatically facilitate and examine learner feedback. When you customize training evaluations by creating end-of-course questions, your training team gains valuable information about the overall success of the course. You can drill down to the usefulness of some questions and the value of the content or message.
When you generate a post-course evaluation, your system is compiling student feedback, saving it in a database for valuable reporting and analysis. Summarizing reactions per student, per course or per question should be an option, as well. Your evaluations can be form-based, occurring at the end of the course, or via direct email to the student. Either way, your administrators can elicit learners' input in just a couple of clicks, giving them the ability to make changes and enhance the course as needed.
Your online training program will generate measurable achievements within the organization, and essential to these metrics is the value placed on the experience by the student. When evaluating feedback by student, by course or by survey question, make certain your LMS or online training system offers the reporting capability you need.
Give your students the option to assess the benefit of their online training experience. It will give your training team an opportunity to gather and analyze critical learner feedback.
