Interpreting the Administrator View — Analytics of your training program: A Case Study of Chalkboard Education
Why you need to understand the analytics in the administrator view
Congratulations! You have successfully onboarded your trainees onto a training and learning platform. A heartier congratulations if that platform is Chalkboard Education. However, the questions appear. What's next? What do you do? You are now receiving data about your trainees from this platform, but how do you interpret it? What kind of data can you even find on the platform? What information is useful for the training and teaching goals you have? All these questions and more is what we seek to bring clarity to in this article. Hopefully, by the end of the article, you will realize the enormous opportunity available once you know how to handle the data you receive from the training platform you opt for.
Chalkboard Education as a case study
To understand what to do with the data you receive, you need to know what data is available. For easier explanations, let us use Chalkboard Education's platform to illustrate.
Basic User and Course Data Provided
Let us start with the basic data you can see in an administrator view. When you sign on a trainee or group of trainees to Chalkboard Education, you can view the number of trainees signed up. You will also view the number of courses they are enrolled in for your organization. This first chunk of information is useful because it allows you to have statistics about enrolment in courses which will be helpful when used with other available tools.
Cohort Feature
Let us say you signed up fifty people from your organization to train on the Chalkboard Education app. However, these people are not homogeneous within your firm and have different needs. With the Cohort feature, you can group these fifty people into sub-groups for easier assignments and identification.
Modules Feature
Let us continue with this scenario. Now that these trainees have been grouped into cohorts, each cohort may need to complete specific unique modules. As an administrator, you can assign and view which cohort is assigned to which module and then track their progress. This is key in ensuring that specific cohorts are trained with specific information and not conflated with information not necessary to them.
Administrative tools to track user behaviour
Great! So we have assigned trainees to modules and cohorts. The next step is to gauge the performance of your trainees. Let us see some administration view tools that can help with that.
Active Users
First, we can see the number of active users. Simply put, this shows how often people return to interact with the training content assigned to them. You can tweak this analytic to view the active users daily, weekly, or monthly. From the data obtained, questions can be asked to improve the training offered. Why is user engagement high? Is it due to the ease of the training platform? Is it due to the content of the training material? Is it due to a mandate by the firm issuing the training? Conversely, similar reciprocal questions can be asked if user engagement is low. Why is user engagement low? Is the training platform hard to navigate? Is the firm not ensuring its trainees are mandated to use the app? These questions, when answered, help build the robustness of your training program and can increase the efficiency of your training.
Student Journey Across Courses
Another useful view available to an administrator is the student journey across courses. Regarding our scenario of signing up fifty users, let us assume that there are seven courses within the training platform that these users need to complete. The administrator view provides a graphical breakdown of how students engage with these courses over time. You might realize a course has very little or very high engagement, or people start viewing the courses but trail off at the end. This allows you to go back to the drawing board and ask the hard questions. What is making students take one course over the other? Why are students struggling to complete a particular course? When such questions are asked, the root causes of the success or failures of your training course are unearthed, and the insights help drive the necessary changes needed to be made.
Average Time Spent
Another important metric available is the average time spent. This shows how much time your trainees spend on your course material, daily, weekly or monthly. You can see the average time spent for each session in a module. The reasons for the average time a person spends on a course can vary, and this metric prompts you once again to find the possible factors. Factors that can influence this data include ease of navigation or attractiveness of the platform they are using, or how engaging their content material is. One main issue that this data points to is relevance. It seeks to answer how relevant your trainees find the platform or the content they are learning.
Best way to use the metrics
These are a fraction of administrators' features when they host their training or educational material on platforms such as Chalkboard Education. However, it is important to note that the best use of these metrics is to use them together. Looking at only one metric to gauge your training quality may give skewed results. However, when used with a blend of other data sources, you are more likely to gain a more holistic view. Moreover, this data tends to be the starting point of investigating further aspects of your training delivery and is not the end-point.
You are ready to interpret your analytics
Congratulations once again! Now, when you open the administrator view of your training program, you will be able to make sense of the data provided, to create useful insights that help improve your training and educational programs.
About Chalkboard Education
Chalkboard Education provides a mobile-based, offline-first Learning Management System tailored for underserved communities' training. Lightweight, inclusive, and complete with full analytics capabilities, Chalkboard Education helps you reach your beneficiaries everywhere in the World seamlessly. Currently used in 12+ countries in Africa, South and North America, Chalkboard Education is available worldwide.
