If your job involves creating training courses (whether for businesses or not), you have probably wondered about their effectiveness: ‘How can I tell if a course is effective?’ ‘What are the indicators of training effectiveness?’ ‘How can I improve my online courses?’ The answer to all these questions lies in the collection and subsequent analysis of feedback.
How to collect feedback to evaluate the effectiveness of your training course?
- Online course platform analytics: If your courses are conducted online, it’s crucial to access insights that show the progress of your students, video viewing rates, completion of activities, and all the metrics that help you understand whether your students are effectively engaging with your courses. An LMS platform like BRAVO! provides many useful metrics for this type of analysis, allowing you to intervene in time to improve engagement rates and make your content go ‘viral.’
- Evaluation surveys: Directly ask your students to fill out feedback forms to identify issues and understand what needs improvement.
- Administrators and reviewers: Having a team review your course can provide quick and relevant feedback. This is why we’ve incorporated the option to add administrators to your work team on the platform. Especially with complex courses and numerous users to manage, having one or more people to support you can make the difference between failure and success.
- Evaluate results: Create gamified tests that allow you to assess the effectiveness of your online course through the results obtained by your students!
Another way to assess the quality of your course is the systemic evaluation approach based on formative and summative assessments. Let’s quickly see what this entails.
Formative Assessment
With formative assessment, data is collected during the program through quizzes, written assignments, or discussion forums. This information is then used to direct teaching and improve learning, student engagement, and results.
Summative Assessment
Summative assessment, on the other hand, occurs at the end of the course, generally through scores and grades given to students in the final exam. The analysis of the data obtained evaluates how well the objectives have been achieved.
The Importance of Formative and Summative Assessments
To build your successful online course, you’ll need to judiciously employ both types of assessments. Include questionnaires and mini-exams with scores in each module; link the answers to the theoretical part where students can review the theory. By doing so, you will achieve several results:
- Encourage students to engage and participate.
- Show students their progress.
- Receive feedback from students.
- Help students understand their areas of improvement.
How to Use Feedback to Improve Your Courses
Answer promptly and provide feedback:
Don’t ignore your students’ questions and comments; respond to them, make observations, and remember to provide continuous stimuli to enhance their learning. Don’t let too much time pass; timeliness is crucial, as in any customer care. Responding within 24-48 hours would be the best choice. Make your students feel supported in their learning journey.
Be available and present:
The keyword is empathy. Utilize body language in your videos, pay close attention to your language, divide your students into smaller classes so you can incorporate synchronous courses via Zoom, giving them the opportunity to ask questions and seek clarification face-to-face.
There are many indicators of training course effectiveness; learn to leverage them to the fullest:
It is increasingly evident that online learning is the future of education. Without necessarily considering the potential of the metaverse, as discussed in this dedicated article, mixed learning between in-person and online lessons, self-learning resources, or online is steadily increasing.
Learning how to design effective online courses or a blended learning experience is essential for every edupreneur.
Using an LMS platform is the best choice for both individual teachers and businesses because it allows the creation of asynchronous learning forms with videos, verification quizzes, and engagement elements even without having a website. With BRAVO!, your courses will be secure and accessible only to authorized students, without missing any educational material.