5 common challenges with eLearning reporting in LearnDash

In response to COVID-19, most schools, corporate organizations, K-12 academies, colleges, and private tutors shifted to eLearning.

In fact, since 2020, 98% of universities have moved classes online. (www.thinkimpact.com)

As a result, the usage of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) has also seen exponential growth. To be precise, the current estimated number of LMS users is 73.8 million. (www.hurix.com)

But that’s not to say that online learning is a smooth sailing ride. Many challenges come with this shift. For instance, how do you ensure that your learners are truly learning?

You guessed it right — by tracking progress!

If you don’t measure progress and identify what’s holding your learners back from completing that course, passing that exam, and earning that online degree, how do you ever take action to help them?

That’s where LMS Reporting comes in.

All modern LMSs (like LearnDash) have additional or optional reporting features. And if not, you can always install an add-on or get a custom reporting tool developed.

But when it comes to tracking progress, performance, and learner engagement, online instructors often struggle to report. Figuring out what metrics to measure is often hard due to the remote nature of the learning environment.

Since you don’t have eyes on your learners, keeping track of their learning behavior, progress, and trends can seem like you’re trying to find clues in the dark.

But that’s not the only challenge that LearnDash instructors face while trying to report learner engagement on their LMS. Honestly, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

So, in this article, we’re going to look at the 5 most common reporting challenges faced by LearnDash users.

But before we dig into that, let’s try to understand why LMS reporting is crucial.

Why is LMS Reporting Important?

LMS reporting is the process of generating reports from a learning management system. These reports provide valuable data on how learners interact with the course material, their progress, and overall performance. LMS reporting allows administrators, trainers, and instructors to get a better understanding of how their training programs are performing and where improvements can be made.

LMS reporting is important for several reasons.

• First, it allows organizations to track learner progress and identify areas where learners may be struggling. This can help trainers and instructors to provide additional support and resources to learners who need it.
• Second, LMS reporting can help organizations to identify trends and patterns in learner behavior. This can help them to adjust their training programs to better meet the needs of their learners.
• Finally, LMS reporting can help organizations demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements by providing evidence of training completion.

Read More: The Importance of Student Reports in Online Learning

Now that we’ve understood why LMS reporting is crucial for the success of your LearnDash business. Let’s explore some of the most common challenges that LearnDash users go through while reporting.

5 Common Challenges with E-learning Reporting 

Collecting analytics data is a time-consuming task

As an online instructor, the majority of your time goes into creating a course, teaching the course material, and responding to doubts. So, manually collecting and tracking course and learner metrics can be hard. Especially if it requires accessing the backend reports — in that case, you may also need some prior technical know-how.

Lack of Accurate Data

The importance of accurate LMS reports cannot be overstated. Accurate reporting is essential for evaluating the effectiveness of training programs, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, and improving learning outcomes. Inaccurate reporting can have negative consequences for learners. For example, learners may receive credit for completing a course or passing an exam, even if they haven’t spent the required time or gone through all the course material. This can lead to a false sense of accomplishment.

Analysis Paralysis

There’s more to reporting than crunching numbers in a spreadsheet. Numbers only tell you half of the story. You need insights that help you understand what the numbers are trying to tell you — insights that help you understand student progress and performance in depth, and take action to improve course effectiveness as well as student performance.

Even when you manage to gather all important LMS metrics, the data can sometimes be too overwhelming to process. In the context of reporting, analysis paralysis can occur when there is too much data to sift through, or when there are too many options for how to present the data. This is because data is usually presented in a spreadsheet and is not so easy on the eyes — making it harder to comprehend and leading to indecision.

Difficult to Share with Others

As an admin, exporting data from the backend can cause you to waste a lot of valuable time. Especially if you lack the skills to directly export student analytics from the WordPress database. And if your B2B clients or other course stakeholders want customized reports — say, to track the progress of a specific group in a specific course — it becomes even more difficult. You’ll need to manually input the data and share it in a CSV or PDF format.

No Dedicated Reports for LearnDash User Roles

In LearnDash (or any LMS for that matter), different user roles have different reporting needs. As an admin, you might want a high-level overview — new enrollments, total course revenue, total courses, learners, and average course completion rate. Meanwhile, instructors and group leaders need drilled-down course metrics like completion time, quiz completion time, and pass/fail rates — limited only to their own courses and groups.

This becomes difficult without a reporting module that helps all LearnDash user roles easily extract the information they’re looking for. And as a result, you end up wasting time looking for and collecting data from multiple reports at the backend.

Quick Self-Check: How Healthy Is Your LearnDash Reporting?

Before jumping to solutions, it’s worth doing a quick audit of where your current reporting stands.

More than two ❌?

You’re likely hitting at least a few of the challenges above — and the solution is a dedicated reporting layer for your LearnDash setup.

Overcoming LMS Reporting Challenges in LearnDash with ProPanel

Being one of the most scalable and customizable WordPress LMS plugins, LearnDash leaves a lot of room to improve the reporting and analytics side of things. And it’s worth noting that the advanced reporting solution that WisdmLabs originally built for LearnDash — WISDM Reports — was so well-regarded that LearnDash acquired it and now offers it as their official analytics add-on: ProPanel.

ProPanel is LearnDash’s dedicated advanced analytics and reporting add-on. It provides graphical reports that track all top-level course and learner metrics, and delivers deeper, more meaningful, and actionable insights for all user roles — admins, instructors, and group leaders.

Not only this, but you also get smart as well as advanced filters to dig deeper into course and learner activity to understand course progress and performance in depth.

This helps you figure out potential course bottlenecks, identify where students are struggling, and which courses or quizzes are too hard or too easy, among other things.

What’s more is that you can export and share the graphical reports with course, quiz, and learner analytics reflecting your learners’ progress, performance, and engagement. Hence, helping you with any further analysis.

So to sum up, ProPanel helps you overcome all LearnDash reporting challenges by providing you with:

• Frontend reports dashboard for each user role — Instructors, Group Leaders, and Admins
• Graphical Reports — Easy-to-understand graphical reports to track course completion rate, course engagement, quiz statistics, and learner pass/fail rates among other things
• Visual Insights — Data-backed and actionable insights to understand learning trends, learner engagement, and course progress
• Real-time reporting — Tracking real-time course and learner analytics to ensure that LMS data is 100% accurate and reliable
• Filtering options — Smart filters to dig deep into course and learner analytics
• Option to export and share — Export course and quiz statistics and share with course stakeholders

Also Read: WISDM Reports for LearnDash: The Perfect LearnDash Reporting and Analytics Plugin

Want to see it in action? Check out the ProPanel demo and see how it can help you get rid of most of the eLearning reporting challenges and improve the eLearning experience.

Ready to try it?

So that’s it for today! I hope this article was helpful. If you have any more queries or suggestions, feel free to comment below.

And if you need help setting up or customising your LearnDash reporting experience, the team at WisdmLabs — the experts behind the original reporting solution — are here to help.

Explore our LearnDash services →

Happy Teaching! 🙂