5 Effective Ways to Track Training Data in Your LMS

It doesn’t matter just how slick, snazzy, or content-rich your learning management system (LMS) is if you can’t determine whether it’s effective in achieving your learning goals. Without understanding the impact of both your formal and informal learning initiatives, it can be challenging to articulate the value of your learning and development program and how your training programs are impacting outcomes.

That’s why it’s imperative for any LMS to be supported by data that can establish whether learning and development targets are being met. There are countless ways to track and evaluate data depending on your goals.

Below are five ways you can track data to leverage the most important information related to your learners and learning programs in your LMS.

1. Internal Reporting

Any LMS worth its salt should come with at least some basic reporting tools that provide an initial understanding of the actions being taken in your LMS. Out-of-the-box Moodle™ and Totara, for example, quickly and easily show reports on when your LMS is being logged into and what programs are being used. This can be at the site, course, and activity levels.

Activity reports should be the bread and butter of the reports available to instructors within the LMS. These simple reports can help achieve greater participation and lead to conversations about resolving common issues like access to the course and time to complete any assigned tasks.

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2. Custom Reports

The reports mentioned above provide feedback on very general training information, such as whether the user logged in or whether they completed an activity. But what about information such as how much time a learner spent on a quiz or the order in which they completed the activities? Having access to this kind of data can help instructors assess the user’s understanding of the materials.

Moodle™ and Totara include basic reporting for these data points, but a hosting partner like Open LMS can also offer custom reports that filter this information by department, job role, or other metrics to further categorize your learners. Both Moodle™ and Totara allow you to expand the default reporting tools with custom reports.

3. Course Evaluations

When talking about analytics, one area that often enters the conversation is the drive to identify areas for improvement. This is where the data provided by the LMS can be very powerful. Looking at how individuals answered questions in a quiz or a SCORM package can help shape a development plan and automatically trigger new learning pathways for learners depending on their results. This data is also instantly available to instructors to ensure that the initial materials and resources used are fulfilling the requirement of the course specification.

4. Scheduled Reports

Having access to all of these reports is great, but what about having them triggered at certain times and sending them to the right people? The answer to that is scheduled reports. Totara, for example, provides easy-to-use scheduling options for nearly any report you build within it. This allows decision-makers to see specific information without even needing to log into the LMS platform. There are also several plugins that can be used to help streamline reporting within Moodle™.

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5. Third-Party Reporting Tools

All of the areas discussed so far are features that are already included in either Moodle™ or Totara, or they can be expanded upon using plugins. To take your LMS data reporting a step further, Open LMS partners with industry leaders like Intelliboard to help meet your reporting, analytics, and training needs. Intelliboard immerses you in a world of real-time reports, dashboards, graphs, and KPIs—all driven by the data obtained through your LMS.

No matter how you choose to do it, effectively tracking and making data-driven decisions from your LMS’s training data is essential to delivering engaging and future-proof learning programs for your organization.