Let Data Drive Your Design Methods

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learning designers discussing design methods

Authoring tools help you create content and add visuals. LMS tools track courses offered and who has taken what course.

Those tools provide support and info helpful to your L&D department internally, but they don’t offer what your stakeholders want: data.

Business leaders are asking L&D to prove their design methods actually yield results. They want proof that learning programs improve their business.

Why do they want this? Because businesses and organizations are driven by numbers. The notion that learning cannot be measured simply doesn’t pass muster. That’s why we created Business Impact 2.0. The industry needed a way to easily convert learning outcomes into business results.  They needed a way to understand the learning business.  This cloud-based software makes even novice designers more effective because it drives them toward designing programs for business results. It creates reports showing the links between instructional design,  job performance, and organizational results.

Learn What Design Methods Do And Don’t Work

Using BI 2.0 makes the work of L&D transparent. It shows the connections between design decisions and business outcomes so teams can easily see which design components work and which don’t. It reveals to students, designers, managers, and senior stakeholders which specific learning activities influence results.

Our customers have used the BI 2.0 platform for years. This gives us excellent data on how effective certain design decisions are.

Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned from our data:

Use better objective-to-time ratios. Some programs use poor objective-to-time ratios. This often happens when no one measured earlier learning programs to find the right ratio. Programs that allow at least a 10 minute time frame per objective increase student ability to reach the objective by 85%.

Evaluate students at the level you expect them to perform. In evaluations, there are recognition questions (multiple choice, true/false) and recall questions (open ended, checklist, matching). On average, students succeed at recognition at high rates (65-90). Yet, students recall at much lower rates (25-50). Our job as learning professionals is to prepare learners to improve job skills. Because of that, consider evaluating students at the level you expect them to perform. If students can’t recall what they have learned without a prompt, then are they really prepared to apply what they’ve learned on the job?

Give managers the tools to help. When assessments from learning programs are given to the managers of the students before the class, there is a 64% increase in successful transfer! This clearly indicates that managers, when given the right information, are ready, willing and able to support learning application.  Managers reported getting both the pre- and post-class data helped them feel more involved in creating the changes they need. These results verify that the language of managers is behavior change (not learning objectives). Therefore, when discussing your intentions and results with your managers you should refer to your behavior objectives that target job tasks.

Design Methods Improved By Business Impact 2.0

The Business Impact 2.0 platform aids learning professionals in three key areas:

Instructional Design

  • Standardize design to enable real-time collaboration between designers
  • Automatically analyze program design quality with the quality index measure
  • Use the platform to generate training requests, course descriptions, outlines, facilitator guides, etc.
  • Easily track all design activities and program quality

Measurement

  • Measure classroom gains, job transfer, and impact on the organization
  • Deliver student tests online or interface with your LMS to capture student data
  • Show employee capability added to the organization through learning programs

ROI

  • Calculate true learning program ROI by comparing program costs and benefits
  • Automatically calculate development and delivery costs
  • Use simple wizard tools to determine dollar value of benefits

At eParamus, we support the use of data to create more effective learning programs. If you need to gain skills in this area or have an interest in Business Impact 2.0, then contact us here at eParamus.

Please follow eParamus on LinkedIn and feel free to connect with me, Laura Paramoure, PhD to discuss the learning challenges you face.

Photo copyright: pressmaster / 123RF Stock Photo

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