EthosCE Analytics Spotlight: Big Data Aggregation and Evaluation

Big data aggregation isn’t just for Fortune 500 marketers: advanced data analytics belongs in the CME director’s strategy arsenal. Big data aggregation is another way of seeing the big picture: by using big data, you can use external insights along with aggregated course and user data to get an accurate portrait of your CME program’s educational impact over time.

Big Data Aggregation Without the Big Hassle: Use an Analytics Platform to Unlock Insights

EthosCE Analytics allows CME directors to examine granular insights (such as patterns in individual responses on learner assessments) in the context of aggregate trends in their data. If you’re using our LMS, you won’t have to collect and slice this data yourself: our included analytics suite collects and manages your data, allowing you to view historical and real-time program insights with a few clicks. You’ll be able to view aggregate course data and then drill down to see patterns in individual learner behaviors and assessments. You aren’t limited just to user behavior and performance data: EthosCE Analytics gives you complete control over your data, allowing you to create customized data segments that give you deep insights on your program’s strengths and limitations. Here are just a few questions big data can help you answer:

• How well are new learners online adapting to changes in my activities content over time?
• Do my learners feel that my content is competitive with offerings by other CME providers?
• How effective is my onboarding process when it comes to helping first-time online learners?
• Which students are the most motivated and likely purchase another course?
• Is my mobile content adapted to the needs of multi-tasking learners?
• Can my program scale successfully?

When asking questions this important, you don’t want to rely on guesswork or insights based on limited data. EthosCE Analytics allows you to view comprehensive summaries of your program’s data at a glance on customizable dashboards in the LMS admin panel.

With the EthosCE Analytics suite, you’ll have direct access to the insights that you need at all times, making it simple for you to look at external data—such as trending topics in a specific industry—and review their relevance to your specific program goals, such as addressing self-identified knowledge gaps among your learners. Big data also eliminates guesstimates when it comes to your most important data: user outcomes.

What Big Data Does for You: Demystifying User Outcomes

CME directors often miss valuable insights into their program’s prospect for success because they are unable to see the big picture when it comes to educational outcomes due to limited data access.

Aggregate learner evaluation data provides a complete portrait of your CME program’s educational impact, allowing you to view patterns in learner performance course-by-course and identify the curricular and LMS-wide issues impacting overall educational quality. Aggregated course data also empowers you to assess your users’ complete educational experience from on-boarding to post-course assessment, helping you to develop the right curricular response to knowledge and competency gaps while optimizing existing tools to promote knowledge retention. With all of your course and learner outcomes data at hand, you can easily distinguish between poor assessment performance due to an individual learning style conflict and a curriculum-wide issue that requires an activities content update.

Big Data’s Most Tempting Flavors

If you’ve ever spent time with computer programmers, you may have heard them use the term “flavors” to describe different iterations of programming languages. Big data also offers you different flavors of knowledge, and with EthosCE Analytics, getting the most out of the world’s best big data resources is easier than ever. With our customizable data dashboards, you can view real-time and historical patterns in learner and course outcomes at a glance. You can even set up notifications to alert you to changes in a dataset—such as the number of students registering for a course or completing an exam—automatically.

If you’re monitoring external data—such as a change in CME requirements for medical professionals in a specific state—it’s easy to look at your dashboard to determine if a news item announcing an added CME requirement had an impact on course registrations or requests for enrollment information in real-time. Alternatively, you might want to determine if doctors from a particular region of the country are focused on an unusually high seasonal workload and are not registering for your courses. This can help you adjust your advertising budget and reallocate human resources. Here are just some of the “flavors” of big data from within your CME program that you can unlock with EthosCE:

• Aggregate educational outcomes by demographic population
  This may help you to target learner groups who have had poor learner assessment outcomes and provide them with access to educational enrichment courses.
• Program-wide self-identified competency and knowledge gaps
  This supports impactful curriculum planning, allowing you to tailor activities content to your audience’s unique educational needs.
• Historical LMS user experience reports
  EthosCE allows you easy access to support ticket data, helping you to gauge the effectiveness of your onboarding process and your LMS platform user experience over time.

The power of big data is also in its vastness. EthosCE makes your program data user-friendly, enabling you to see the relevance of external big data more easily.

Here are some great (free!) external big data sources for you which may help you gain valuable insights into potential activities content topics:

• US Healthcare Statistics – From the US Department of Health
• Global Healthcare Statistics – From the World Bank
• CME Statistics – From ACCME

Sold? Here’s How to Get Your Hands on Big Data

First, you might want to stop trying to manage your data on your own. Manual data collection is a time-consuming undertaking that is often corrupted by human error. Incomplete data collection is common when course and user information is scraped manually. Even worse, a gap in pertinent data may not be discovered until the negative impact of misdirected policy based on a false insight becomes evident.

As a CME director, you would probably spend your time on pressing management issues rather than wrangling spreadsheets. That’s why EthosCE Analytics provides enterprise-grade analytics capabilities to organizations of every size. With our LMS, your data management and analytics solution are up and running on day one. We offer the advanced analytics and reporting capabilities that CME Directors need to scale intelligently: you won’t have to hunt for a third-party solution, regardless of how fast your program grows.

EthosCE is designed specially for medical CE, with over 16 years of experience in the field. We’ve helped many associations and universities make the switch to our easy-to-use LMS.

If you’d like to learn more about how EthosCE may be the right LMS for you and your data, feel free to request a 1-on-1 walkthrough with one of our experts today!