Ask Me Anything: Analyzing Learner Data

Nicholas Boyles
Nicholas Boyles
CAPTAIN
Third Anniversary 10 Comments
edited August 6 in Talent Insights

We all love data. Data can tell us pretty much anything we want to know about what our learners are doing, how they are accessing learning programs, what content they are launching, how much time they’ve spent and so much more. Data tells stories about how our learning programs are working in ways that we can’t always see without it.

For example, trending data can show us how a learning program has grown over the past few years. If we see a trend where the program grew for a few years, then started to drop off, it’s time to look at the program and refresh our commitment to learner engagement.

Another great example is returning learner rate. The calculation for this metric is the number of learners who have accessed content on two or more different dates divided by the total number of learners accessing content.  A high returning learner rate means that your learners are finding the content useful and coming back for more and/or may be utilizing the content on the fly as they need it. A low returning learner rate doesn’t mean the opposite – you may notice that while they may not be coming back often, when they do, they are spending more time in the content they do access.

You can see from the examples above that data is subjective. We analyze the numbers, but to truly understand the numbers, we need to also look at the program overall. Wrapping the data with the overall program information (Are you marketing the program? Are Managers assigning the program to your learners? What other variables (ex: holidays) are there?) will give you the clearest story from the data.  

We know that many people struggle with data analysis, and not every company has the bandwidth to hire a data analyst. Learning Admins often take on the role of data analyst for the learning program, and many times it’s a struggle. How do I find the total number of learners in a region? What’s the best way to figure out or parse the duration fields from the Percipio report? Is there a way to break the data down by company or department? Even this seemingly simple questions can be difficult to figure out in the face of large amounts of data.

I’m Nick Boyles, and I’ve been working with data at Skillsoft for 6 years. I build many of the tools that our CSMs use to help our customers visualize their data, and I’ll be here to answer your questions! The Analyzing Learner Data AMA will take place on Tuesday Feb 22 at Noon Eastern Time. I look forward to seeing you there!

Check out our Ask Me Anything discussion on this topic here