Shooting in the 90’s – I’m not speaking of my golf handicap, I am referring to our web-based learning completions. For leadership, sales and service training across many industries we now regularly average almost 95 percent…we’ve even hit 100 percent with some cohorts! Our competitors are envious, I’ll still tell you how we do it.
Kirkpatrick’s 4 levels of evaluation still rule. Segmenting measurement into reaction, learning, behavior and results applies today, but 21st century deployment demands adaptation. In particular, level two’s assessment of participant ‘learning’ is the area in which we’ve found our edge. There are now levels within a level – specifically, we now give ‘completions’ much greater weight within the tracking of aggregate ‘learning’. Where passing around a single sign-in sheet took care of completions verification for instructor-led training, that same tracking for completion with virtual delivery is more complex and meaningful than ever.
How did we come to this? We listen to our customers. Synchronous web-ex virtual meetings, while saving travel expense, can still be costly to deploy. One client tells us of their own initial excitement at the prospect of assessing utilization of their web-ex delivery. This was measured as the percentage of scheduled time that their web-ex meetings were the ‘live’ screen on participants’ computers. He was not happy with the results. They averaged only 15 to 20 percent – meaning that during 80 to 85 percent of each hour that our client was delivering training, participants were doing something else!
Another client deployed powerful self-study programming that barely hit 50 percent completion. A good LMS makes it is easy to measure achievement of learning objectives, but it was also easy to confirm that less than half of the participants assigned the virtual lessons actually completed them. In both of these examples, those that completed the learning achieved objectives, but the very technology that makes it convenient for participants to study when and where they need to, also makes it easy to forget, overlook or even ignore the learning. Everyone is drinking the proverbial waterfall these days (some days we don’t even get a chance to start on our to-do lists). When self-study lessons hit our Inbox it’s easy to pass by in favor of more pressing action items. With web-ex it’s easy to just ‘attend’ a session via smart phone, but on ‘mute’ while doing something else entirely. I’m not judging, this is simple truth.
So how to we consistently shoot in the 90’s for completions, with equally elevated achievement of learning objectives? In a word, leverage. We leverage data via consistent, overt broadcast communication. Most of our cohort learning is deployed via several dozen short (1-3 minute) web-based lessons that are assigned over a 9 to 10 week period. Every Monday of that 9 or 10 week period we send a completions report to the entire cohort – and then some! Each participant knows the aggregate completion percentage of their cohort, and each one also sees who has done their work and who has not. These reports have also been sent to others within the organization whose ‘incomplete’ list you don’t want to be on. We leverage communication, we leverage public accountability. It works. If you’d like to hear more on how we do it, I’d love to talk it over.
-Don Brown
don@donbrown.org
Don Brown dedicates his career to ‘helping people with people’ in leadership, sales and customer service. Bilingual and experienced at the executive and line-level alike, you see the results of his work across dozens of industries, including brewing, automotive, airline, banking and medical equipment.
Speaking, writing, coaching and selling to the best – Ford Motor Company, Anheuser-Busch, United Airlines, Harley-Davidson, Jaguar Cars, Hilton Hotels and many, many more – Don takes great pride in long-standing customer relationships (some running well over twenty years).
