In the world of rapidly changing information and training requirements, don’t you think it is important for your organization to be prepared for the challenges of the future? The business world is moving at a fast pace, requiring government organizations like you to step up and respond with effective strategies that outrun the competition. To keep up it becomes critical to focus on workforce readiness that involves training employees with a vision to meet current as well as future business goals.
Using traditional training methods is a no-no here, as they are not time-efficient enough. Being in the government sector, you might be challenged with assessing upcoming market trends and keeping your employees trained accordingly. This makes your learning management system (LMS) a vital tool to accomplish reduced expenses associated with traditional training and provision of effective training to the employees to bolster their skill sets.
Your LMS should make it easy for your employees to access their online training materials on-the-go as well as escalate workplace productivity.
There are multiple types of learning management systems available in the market. Which one you are using will have a strong impact on your success in meeting your training and department goals.
There are ways to evaluate how well your LMS is fulfilling your government business goals? Here are some useful tips that will help you understand how you can measure the effectiveness of your LMS. Here we go:
1. Conduct Evaluation Workshops
First and foremost, you should conduct an evaluation workshop with your system admins, as they can give you an inside scoop of User Experience. They have worked extensively with the system and thus, can help you to assess user interface, accessibility (508 Compliance), and usability of the platform. Evaluation workshops can also help you discover some user pain points, such as navigation issues that interrupt the workflow of the LMS users.
2. LMS Metrics
When you weigh business reports against LMS metrics, you can learn about potential UX issues that are disrupting the User Experience. For instance, you might observe that from the day you implemented the training program, the customer satisfaction statistics are continuously at a decline. When you trace this back, you find that there has been low participation in the learning management system among your customer support team. It can become clearly evident that the users found the User Interface of the LMS difficult to use and faced challenges with the navigation controls. Through this back-tracking approach, you can explore many different other aspects of User Interface that may pose a hindrance in the effectiveness of your LMS.
3. Tree Testing Technique
To check the reliability and effectiveness of your LMS, tree testing technique proves to be an ideal approach. It will help you evaluate the findability of topics on which training is to be provided on the platform. This technique is not influenced by visual design or navigation aids and is conducted on the text version of the platform’s structure. See (link) for information about how to do Tree Testing. This exercise will help you determine if the content of the online training is grouped logically, if certain labels in the LMS are valuable for the learners, and if the users are able to find their interest-related topics easily in the LMS.
4. Learners’ Data
Using the LMS reports or learners’ data, you can uncover additional hidden pain points of UX and other reliability issues in the LMS. For example, you may observe that your employees took more than the expected time frame to complete a specific online training module. To check the reason behind this, you can conduct observations and surveys through different usability tests. Most of the time the root cause of such problems is navigation issues. Hence, using learners’ data, you can often reveal the true cause of hampering the achievement of end business objectives. Obviously, if your users’ knowledge retention and employee engagement are poor, you won’t be able to accomplish your goals.
5. User Feedback
This is one of the simplest ways to check the reliability of your LMS. Just as surveys are an essential part of determining the effectiveness of offline training programs, online survey tools can help in gaining valuable feedback on training you’ve provided. Through the reporting and analytics tools in learning management systems, the administrators can have instant access to the survey feedback, giving them an exact picture of the personal experience of each employee with the LMS.
6. Heuristic Evaluations
Last but not least, you can make use of heuristic evaluations to judge the reliability factor of the LMS. This is a method through which one or more UX experts examine the interface according to a set of rules, known as heuristics. Unlike the full usability test, it is an instant method to evaluate the user experience of the LMS in the early development phases of the training module. An interesting thing about this kind of evaluation is that you do not need the involvement of real users to accomplish it.
Every year, government agencies spend billions of dollars on employee training, discussing knowledge management and discovering ways to maximize their training investments. They may not recognize that this can be easily done through an effective Learning Management System (LMS) that complies with FedRAMP certification.
When you launch your online training program, invest the time to utilize these strategies to measure the reliability and effectiveness of the LMS. Put your LMS to the test to explore any issues in the LMS, solve them, and set yourself up to attain your business goals.