Question

Fundamental flaw? Or feature? Group centric reporting on learning objects

  • 8 November 2021
  • 3 replies
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dklinger
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Evening.

To get us where we are today, I had to go through a vendor review to show due diligence to a group of executives that were going to be tasked with a purchase decision. I walked key features with each vendor, watched and listened carefully…and acted as a primary vetting agent of the experience. And a whole category was dedicated to reporting. What I found strikingly odd was seeing a concept missed. 3 of the 4  products bypass an opportunity that may seem weird if you have never seen an LMS do it, but when it works? Not only is it elegant? But then people get what learning management really is at its core. The idea is having a group-centric “report” get reported on for its completions in a pull scenario where people are not mapped (subscribed) to a learning object.

Here is the scenario:

  • Put a course into a catalog that is visible to everyone allowing for a “pull” by learners to happen
  • People begin pulling it
  • You get a request to run a report to see who has and who has not attempted, who has started a course, and who has completed it from a list of people
  • You load the group
  • You run a group centric report for the course
  • on running, you find that the not attempted are not shown in the report

Now where that scenario is rather elementary to solve on paper (because you will have three elements you are after - completions and subscribed and/or those in progress) that does mean you need to go to spreadsheets to generate who has not attempted. Doesn’t something seem weird or (I would go as far as saying something) is wrong with needing to potentially rub a demographics list against your completion report IF you specified to the system who the report should already be on?
And please don’t tell me - “well now that you have census file fed into the system you could map people to the learning object to get your desired result”…that’s too many steps…the system should be able to report on all of “statuses” mentioned above - with “not attempted” coming along as a status.

Anywho…..I am curious of your thoughts.

 

 

3 replies

dklinger
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The piece of mapping every piece of learning to groups to derive metrics on those that have not started seems like it is the fundamental challenge. Those that are “unmapped” to learning in the “targeted audience” (in this case) have as much value to internal customers if the person did not start or if they have subscribed and not started the course or the course is underway and not complete. They think very binary for the most part - COMPLETE and INCOMPLETE…the rest is nuance…I hope I am making sense.

C
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We face the same challenge. In our scenario, we publish a new course for our resellers every 4 weeks or so and would like to know who has not started the course. If users from a company are not taking the new courses, our channel managers need to address this in their quarterly business reviews. 

Currently, we solve this by using enrollment rules and enrolling everyone from the reseller branch in the new course. The people who have not started the course show up as “enrolled” in the report, users who actually interacted with the course have the status “in progress”. 

However, for reporting purposes, I would much rather be able to distinguish between “enrolled, not started” and “not enrolled”. Or similarly, a report that shows who didn’t log in in the last month. 

dklinger
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@Ceeee - I know you are getting it.

I do think you can get a report to show you who has not logged in - there is a last accessed date field that can help there.

I agree with you that with some simple manipulation - that the statuses can reflect what they mean in practice (not attempted, in progress, completed).

The key issue - is that we are manipulating the data outside of the system. That is the harder part. Especially in pull scenarios - not having that kind of insight - feels frustrating.

I keep coming back to - if I fed the system a group? Why cant we use it to report on how a group is doing (and more importantly not doing) even if they were not mapped to that learning?

Its my opinion? We don’t need the extra steps in between of mapping to enrollment rules and learning objects. We need the reporting system to rub these two things together and give us a complete output, not just who has begun or touched the learning.

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