6 Signs That Your eLearning Assessments Are Missing the Mark

An eLearning assessment offers you the chance to test knowledge and skill development. But not all assessments are created equal. Here are a few of the tell-tale signs that may indicate if your eLearning assessment strategy is on target or needs some fine tuning.

1. Create different eLearning assessments for different people.
   One of the main goals of any online training program is to cater a wide range of training needs; after all, your employees not only have different professional backgrounds and educational history, but also have different expectations and needs, based upon their position within the company. This is why you need to create separate eLearning assessments for different target groups.
2. Be concise.
   For eLearning assessments to be effective, they need to be clear and aligned with goals and objectives of the online training course. Make sure that you leave no room for misunderstandings; the more specific and concise your questions are, the more effective the eLearning assessment process will be.
3. Use variety.
   Don’t be stingy with variety; choose the right authoring tools and provide various types of questions in your quizzes, such as multiple choice questions, true/false questions, yes/no questions, etc., and various multimedia elements such as audio, video, and visuals. Variety in methods and tools will significantly enhance the eLearning assessment experience, as it ensures that all of your employees’ learning needs, will be successfully accommodated.
4. Focus on performance assessments.
   As almost every online training program’s main goal is to improve employees’ performance and productivity, focusing on performance assessments will help you get into the essence of online training. It’s not difficult to develop performance assessments: Just use performance goals and create two different eLearning assessment sets; before and after the online training. By contrasting performance results prior and after online training, you will be able to determine whether the abilities and skills of your employees have been developed.
5. Create eLearning assessments to measure employees’ reaction to the online training program.
   You may already know that creating an emotional connection between an online training course and its audience increases the effectiveness of the online training course, as the learning process is significantly facilitated when the employee feels positive towards it. Measuring your employees’ reaction means basically asking them for feedback; create eLearning assessments that will give you answers about whether your audience liked or disliked the methods and tools you have used, whether they found the online tests and quizzes clear, and so on. To ensure that this type of eLearning assessments is really effective, consider making the feedback results anonymous.
6. Analyze eLearning assessment results.
   Last but not least, in order to effectively measure the effectiveness of your online training you need to evaluate your eLearning assessments’ results. How? Take advantage of your Learning Management System; most Learning Management Systems can track eLearning assessment results and offer you valuable information about your learners’ participation, progress, success, or failure, and performance difficulties. Once you have gathered the information, it is up to you to summarize the eLearning assessments’ reports you need and analyze them to evaluate the whole process. The collected data will help you understand how to improve your online training program.

Excerpts from this article were taken from elearningindustry.com