According to ATD’s State of the Industry report, organizations spent $1,296 per employee on learning in 2017. Yet many companies are not happy with the return of investment they receive from training expenditures. Organizations aren’t happy with the ROI because current courses are not driving the results they’re supposed to be achieving.
According to eLearning Gurus, one of the biggest challenge is the content, which is not driving performance in the company.
There are so many delivery methods in training but let’s focus on the most common delivery method for now – eLearning.
Are your e-learning courses impactful? If you are a training or LMS administrator, you would know that when learner finishes the course, it shows completed in the LMS with the scores of end of course assessment. Either of them will not help you to identify the skill gap.
For companies, it’s imperative to know how performance is measured and how eLearning courses could help. Finding a common denominator between performance and learning would help instructional designers to analyze the gap.
Existing Evaluation is Broken
The customer support department is one of those departments where you can see the rapid impact of your e-learning courses. It could be either scenario-based learning or microlearning.
Unfortunately, the existing evaluation criteria are broken. Courses are connected with completion rather than skills. Key performance indicators can help you to identify the skills. But e-learning courses that are published via SCORM can only report “completion” in the LMS. How would you make a connection between eLearning courses versus the agent’s performance?
How to Solve the Mystery?
The best solution is to design e-learning courses that follow skill-based learning. Each course will help learners classify the skill gaps, along with course recommendations. Depending on the nature of the business, finding the best KPIs that will measure performance and identify key skills learner would need.
Once the skills are identified, create a pre-assessment to measure the employee’s abilities in those skill areas. Each ability must be tracked separately, which is impossible in SCORM courses. For that, xAPI plays a vital role to report scores as statements. Once gaps are identified, recommend courses you think will fill those gaps.
Scenario
In this article, I have designed a scenario using xAPI to demonstrate how skill-based evaluation looks like.
Let’s meet Bob. Bob is an instructional designer for ABC company. Recently, he found out that too many customer support agents lacked the necessary communication skills to do their jobs effectively. Sherin asked Bob to design a pre-assessment course for agents on Communication Skills. The course will help agents to identify the abilities to improve such as listening, body language, nonverbal cues, and writing skills. The course will also recommend the courses that will help agents to improve their skills.
Bob’s organization has an in-house learning management system (LMS) integrated with the SCORM Cloud.
Challenge
It’s obvious that skill-based learning is the best approach to overcoming the skills gaps of these customer support agents. But Bob ran into several challenges:
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SCORM limitation
The biggest limitation of SCORM is, in e-learning developer’s language, that it reports only one result slide per SCORM package. For this scenario, the mode of evaluation must be different. Instead of showing complete or incomplete, the system needed to report scores of each ability with overall progress of a skill.
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LMS supports SCORM only
Most LMSs support SCORM files only. In this case, Bob needed a reporting tool to track abilities of each skill.
Solution
Bob took the challenge and start analyzing the data. He found that the In-house LMS generates reports from SCORM Cloud which happens to be a Learning Record System LRS.
It’s important for Bob to understand the fundamentals of xAPI before he moves forward. xAPI is governed by Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) that gives the authorization to use for data usability. Authoring tools (Storyline and Captivate) allow Bob to create xAPI statements using Javascript and publish course as TINCAN xAPI format instead of SCORM. Upload the e-learning course to SCORM Cloud LRS.
Bob took that challenge and created the competency framework to identify the gap. He created pre-assessment for a communication skills course by creating 10 questions for each ability. On the result slide, Bob created xAPI statements to track the scores for each ability. All the statements will send to SCORM Cloud – LRS. Later, Bob, further, added one more trigger to show recommend course(s), if agents couldn’t pass any of the abilities.
These statements will help Bob and Sherin to analyze the learner’s abilities in each skill with recommended courses. They can forward those numbers to relevant supervisors or team’s managers.
xAPI in Action
Click here to see the module. All the statements are forwarding to SCORM Cloud.
To see the statements in SCORM Cloud, use the credentials below:
SCORM Cloud Details:
URL: https://cloud.scorm.com/sc/guest/SignInForm
User Name: hassamhanif@gmail.com
Password: password123@@
Note: You need to click on the Statement viewer in SCORM cloud.
Results
Using xAPI bring a significant impact on the ABC company. Sherin – The manager is now able to analyze the agents’ skill gap with the help of skill-based assessment with course recommendations.
Next steps
This is just the beginning. Pre-assessments will help you to track the existing skills of the learner. Courses or modules will be recommended depending on their scores. Learner will take those courses and take the post-assessment to compare the ability or skill with pre-assessment. Scores will determine the effectiveness of the e-Learning course.
Resources
Beer, M., Finnström, M. & Schrader, D. (2016, October). Why Leadership Training Fails—and What to Do About It. Harvard Business Review.