An LMS (like LearnDash) is not just designed to create/monetize online courses. It can give you insights about your learner’s performance.
All learning management systems nowadays are equipped with reporting and grading features. They provide all the top-level metrics that you need including course enrollments, revenue, and progress details.
But to get ‘insights’ about the learner & course activity, you need to go deeper.
So what can you do to reveal these secrets?
Well, in this article I’ll take you through 5 ways that will help you dig up some meaning out of the statistics on your LearnDash LMS.
Let’s begin.
How to get insights in LearnDash?
1. Keep an eye on course and quiz activity
LMS activities go beyond just course enrollment status and quiz attempts.
Monitoring your LMS for course performance and learner’s progress can help you further understand the impact of your course offering. But to get this information you need ‘detailed course and quiz reports’.
Reports that capture insights in LearnDash like – course completion rates, quiz completion rates, learner pass/fail rate, etc.
Some learners might have completed 90 % while others can’t get past 20. What if learners don’t find your course engaging enough to continue after they sign up?
Metrics like ‘course completion rate‘ can give you a summary of how many learners have completed, not completed your course, or are in progress.
Similarly, ‘quiz completion rates’ can tell you whether learners understand the course content or not.
To further understand course/quiz activity, ‘Learner pass rate’ in the course and quiz reports give you details about how many learners have completed all quizzes in your courses.
2. Analyze learner engagement with the course content
Did someone complete a 20-hour course in 20 minutes? Or are they taking too long to complete the course on ‘First Aid Training’?
Reports that record learner behavior will tell you avg time spent on courses as well as quizzes. It’s a smart way to understand how learners interact with the course content in real-time.
Thus, tracking engagement can reveal the true nature of how learners spend their time on your LMS.
Further Reading: How to use WISDM Reports for LearnDash to improve learner experience
3. Get ultra-specific with filters
After getting an overview of course-wise performance, you can narrow down on ‘lessons’ or ‘topics’ that have been completed by the user.
With the help of advanced filters like course category, quiz category, lesson, topic, date, etc., you can zone in on every aspect of your course offering.
The reports thus generated will segment the LearnDash course activity by the time spent on courses, and the avg. completion rate for courses and quizzes. Therefore it can help you pinpoint the exact module your learners are struggling with.
Hence, filtered reports help you divide the information to get more clarity about your learners.
Pro Tip: You can also export these reports to share among instructors to further analyze performance.
4. Evaluate individual and group progress reports
Apart from the usual course-wise reports, you can find valuable information in group reports as well as reports for a specific learner.
The group course and quiz activity reports reveal the results for the desired group.
With the help of ‘Group reports’, not only do you get a crisp summary of the cohort’s performance but can also analyze their course and quiz progress in depth. Also, it becomes easier for group leaders to report to the course admin and instructor.
Additionally, you can get important statistics about the performance of each learner with the help of ‘learner-specific reports’.
From course completion status to quiz performance and pass/fail rates, these reports will help you single out top performers or laggards from the sea of learners.
Further Reading: 5 Amazing reports in WISDM Reports for LearnDash
5. Explore quiz results
It’s good to know the pass/fail rate of your quizzes. But it can only give you an overview of your learners’ performance.
Your LMS should also allow you to analyze answers to questions so that you can see if the learners truly understand the course content or not.
For example – ‘Custom quiz reports’ can break down quiz performance by quiz title, category, attempts, time spent, no. of incorrect answers, avg. pass rate, and more.
Thus giving you all the data you need to compare quiz results, know whether your learner is able to grasp what is being taught in the course, and identify tough spots.
Since LearnDash is equipped to provide all top-level LMS metrics, you will need enhanced reporting and grading features to get these insights. You can either get a custom reporting module or use one of these plugins:
- WISDM Reports for LearnDash – Offers a stunning reporting dashboard with drilled-down reports for all learner activities.
- Tin Canny LearnDash Reporting – Tracks more than just basic LearnDash activities, provides user-wise as well as frontend quiz reports, etc.
- User insights – Examines the overall statistics about the student’s activity on courses and quizzes.
- Frontend scores and reports – Provides assessment reports, quiz reports, and automates scoring in LearnDash.
Conclusion
As a course creator, you want to learn different things about your courses and learners.
Who knows how insights can inspire you to bring about changes in our courses.
So, these are the ways you can use to get ‘behind the scenes’ of your LearnDash course and learner activity.
There are lots and lots of options to enhance the analytics and reporting on your LearnDash LMS. The plugins mentioned above are seriously worth considering as they offer the most comprehensive insights about all LearnDash activities.
In fact, you can download WISDM Reports for LearnDash and start using it for free.
So go ahead and take it for a run.
Let us know what you think about it in the comments below.