Want to Know Which Learners Provide the Most Value? Here’s How.

Identifying which learners are most likely to become repeat students doesn’t have to involve guesswork. With access to the right data, developing an accurate portrait of the needs of high value learners can be painless.

Who Are These People? Developing an Accurate Learner Profile

With a comprehensive learner profile, you can determine which learners provide the most value and take steps to stoke their engagement and reach new learners of a similar profile. Here are just some of the key data that you will want to keep tabs on:

Learner Behavior

How are your students interacting with the course material?

• Are learner assessment scores improving over time for most students?
• Does learner feedback indicate that activities present key concepts clearly and simple to navigate?

How do your learners respond after an unsatisfactory score on an assessment?

• Do struggling students take advantage of educational enrichment opportunities when offered?
• Are learners with poor assessment performances responding to follow-up emails readily?

LMS Usage

How are learners interacting with the platform?

• Are students frequently stopping an activity before completing a section?
• Are new students submitting support tickets on a regular basis even after the onboarding process?

Course Completion

How engaged are your learners?

• How do current course completion rates compare to those in previous review periods?
• How have course completion rates been impacted by changes in curriculum or course presentation?

User Experience

Which students are the most engaged?

• Are there students who show resilience after learner assessment or platform use challenges?
• Are there strong performing learners who are also highly communicative on student forums or via learner feedback requests?

Once you’ve put together a clear picture of how your learners are performing and interacting with the LMS, you can drill down from the aggregate data to create more detailed portraits of individual learners. Here are some of the important data that you will want to have on hand:

On strong performers and motivated, average learners:

• In which competency areas are they the strongest?
• Where do they show weak knowledge retention?
• Are their articulated educational goals achievable?
• What areas of knowledge are important for their professional practice but not covered in their current course?
• How do they respond to educational intervention (feedback after learner assessments or offers of supplemental educational resources)
• When do they typically experience knowledge retention challenges during an activity?
• Which type of supplemental educational resources have they used and seen performance improvement?

Find these insights in:

• Learner assessment scores
• LMS usage data (time spent per activity, logins, and other data)
• Onboarding feedback
• Post-course feedback

Want to Find Which Learners Provide the Most Value? 3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Bother Wrestling With Your Data

If you are using a generic LMS, you’ll have to scrape all of the above data yourself. Here are three reasons why your efforts may do more harm than good.

Human error corrupts insights.
Missing or inaccurate information is par for the course with manual data collection.

Flawed data skews reporting.
When your insights are based on faulty data, your reports will be flawed as well.

Long-term strategy suffers from dirty data.
Strategy based on reporting that carries data marred by errors will inevitably be misdirected.

Set it and forget it with an enterprise-grade LMS

If you are using an enterprise-grade LMS, then monitoring all of this data will be effortless. With EthosCE, you can even create an alert that automatically notifies you via email of changes in specific datasets immediately. EthosCE Analysis—a comprehensive analytics suite that comes bundled with the EthosCE LMS, automates data collection, management, and reporting, allowing CME directors to access and share critical data easily.

So what do you do with all of this data?

Your most important asset in identifying which learners provide the most value is your data. With data-driven insights, you can create a portrait of your learners’ professional motivations, educational challenges, and learning styles that can be used to improve their user experience and ultimately win their loyalty. Here are just some examples of how insights can translate into strategy:

Marketing
Identify visual learners based on improved performance after viewing supplemental educational videos and present them with a 30-second video trailer featuring highlights from an upcoming course rather than a standard marketing email.

Learner Retention
Provide automated feedback per response on learner assessments taken by struggling learners. This option is available on the EthosCE LMS but not most generic LMS platforms.

User Engagement
Motivate high value but disengaged students to regain interest in their learning experience by allowing them to provide feedback at each point of their course. Provide interactive quizzes that allow them to self-assess their learning styles and knowledge retention without penalty.

Learner Retention

With comprehensive learner data at your fingertips, you can develop a behavioral map indicating pain points in the course experience that may be causing high value learners to drop out or lose interest in registering for new programs.

For example:

• 30% of new learners drop out after taking the second quiz in your latest course
• 90% of those who stay finish the course
• 80% of those who drop out also submitted support tickets complaining of difficulty completing their activity from their mobile device

Insight Summary:
Mobile learners are becoming frustrated with an accessibility issue on the second quiz. It’s time to review the mobile device compatibility of your LMS.

If you are using an enterprise-grade LMS platform, you should have access to a data visualization feature. EthosCE allows you to transform your data-driven insights such as those above into graphic visualizations that can form the basis of clear strategy directives in just a few clicks. EthosCE also makes it simple to share visuals throughout your organization. This helps every team member to get on board with the operational or curriculum changes necessary to keep high value learners engaged.

Now You Know Which Learners Provide the Most Value: What Next?

EthosCE offers a comprehensive CME management suite that provides a best-in-class solution for growing CME programs. Our core features include:

• An enterprise-grade analytics suite with customizable dashboards that presents real-time and historical learner, course, and LMS platform usage data side-by-side.
• Easily shareable data visualizations, customized reports, and automated alerts allowing you to keep your team up to date on critical program data.
• An advanced CME LMS that scales effortlessly, allowing you to customize content and add features such as video, animation, and live webinar streaming.
• Learn more about our LMS features.

As a CME director, you work hard to provide every student with an exceptional educational experience. Your LMS should make your job easier, not more complicated. If you’ve outgrown your generic LMS, we’re ready to help. EthosCE is designed specially for learners, 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.

Curious about CME management on an enterprise-grade platform? Connect with us for a demo today and see how EthosCE can help.