What Education Directors Have to Lose Without Smart Reporting

If you’re like most committed CME Directors, you avoid cutting corners when it comes to giving your students the best educational resources available. You’re exacting in your attention to detail, staying on top of usability issues with your LMS, stretching your budget wisely, and keeping up-to-date on the latest tools to improve your learners’ educational outcomes.

Without smart reporting, however, your efforts to ensure excellence in your programming may fall significantly short of success. That’s because the valuable data that your learners generate every day is useless unless it can be readily transformed into insights. It can’t help you choose new activities content or head off a mass departure of students frustrated with your LMS navigation. Without smart reporting, you lose the data that you need to examine your program’s progress towards its CME goals. You also lose your most important tool for assessing, predicting, and improving learner outcomes.

Three Facts About Data That You Can’t Ignore

The good news is that every CME program generates valuable data. Once you’ve found the best way to collect, store, and transform it into actionable insights, you will have a permanent foundation for long-term strategy building: when your program scales, so will your creative solutions. Here’s why:

1) Access to accurate course data and the ability to easily share that data across an organization is essential for CME program success.
Your team should have the data that they need to intuitively follow your leadership when completing critical tasks. When reporting and data update alerts are automated then every team member has the information that they need to make informed decisions as new areas of concern arise.

2) Data collection and management should be automated to avoid human error.
Manual data management inevitably leads to errors that can corrupt the entire decision-making chain. While some errors may initially have a relatively minor effect, as your program scales the impact of these issues could redouble, causing you to build long-term strategy based on information that is out of data, incomplete, or simply false.

3) Smart reporting is a key component of ACCME compliance.
If you are the CME Director for a program seeking ACCME Accreditation or Reaccreditation, then you can’t afford to risk a Self Study that is compromised by poor data collectiving practices. The EthosCE Analytics suite (which comes bundled with the EthosCE LMS) streamlines the reporting process by managing data collection and management, while making it easy to submit PARS-compliant reports.

How Smart Reporting Helps You Do Your Job

Human error corrupts insights, skews the outcomes of benchmark analysis, and ultimately compromises long-term strategy. Fortunately, if you are using a platform that automates data collection and management, then you will be able to retrieve the data that you need, and their corresponding insights effortlessly. Through the EthosCE LMS, customizable dashboards allow you to view real-time and historical course and learner data at a glance, enabling you to drill down to granular insights to uncover emergent patterns in educational outcomes. With automated data collection via the EthosCE Analytics suite your insights are:

• Generated directly from the LMS platform
• Instantly available across your organization
• Automatically sent to stakeholders as alerts when critical information updates

Customizable reports and scheduled notifications allow you to send the data that you want to share with your team automatically or when you decide to. Your entire organization can start every day on the same page. Smart reporting means no email chains or unwieldy spreadsheets to hunt for in your Spam box. You can focus on leadership and strategy development without spending time making sure your team is up-to-date on the pertinent data and workflows.

Getting the Facts on Course and Learner Outcomes Doesn’t Have to Be Painful

When fresh, relevant data is readily available, it becomes easier for you to develop programs that target knowledge and competency gaps. With frictionless, automated data collection, you can easily identify patterns in course data and learner behaviors and connect the dots. If you’ve introduced new content to an activity and seen a slump in learner assessment scoring, you can use your analytics dashboard to explore your data to reveal the story behind the numbers. For example you could determine:

• Is the new content problematic for all students or just those with less experience using an LMS?
• Are there questions on the assessments that are proving too challenging even for learners who are well versed in the material?
• Are learners at the risk of dropping out calling for tech support after scoring poorly on their exam?

The answers to those questions will form the foundation of your forward-looking strategy. EthosCE Analytics allows you to create a customized report that summarizes your new insights with just a few clicks.

Here are just some of the metrics you’ll be able to monitor at a glance:

• Historical and current activity completion rates
• Aggregate and individual learner assessment performance segmented by demographic data, professional experience, area of expertise, or other tags
• Learner engagement data based on email responsiveness and learner LMS interactivity
• Support ticket data
• Post-activity learner feedback
• Per question learner assessment performance

If you use our advanced data visualizations feature, you can transform your findings from traditional reports into elegant visualizations that illustrate your findings and present your next steps.

Stop Fighting With Your Data: How Data Visualizations Will Make Your Reporting Headaches Go Away

While your needs your reports, they may not have the time to interrupt their workflow to read them thoroughly. Data visualizations are a great way to deliver complex insights and data summaries in seconds.

Just like our reports, EthosCE Analysis visualizations are simple to share across the organization, making it easy to connect patterns in data to course completion, learner outcomes, and other pressing issues.

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. With EthosCE, data visualizations, smart reporting takes a few seconds, not a few hours worth of meetings: it means effortless data sharing and a streamlined idea-to-strategy-to-implementation process. The bottom line: EthosCE Analysis is an enterprise grade solution to data collection, management, and reporting challenges. When you switch to an enterprise-grade platform, you’re done with DIY data. Ready to get smart about course data reporting? Connect with us for a demo and see what your data can do for you.

If you’d like to learn more about how EthosCE may be the right LMS for you, feel free to request a 1-on-1 walkthrough with one of our education CE experts here.