In this post, we will have a look at how LMS reporting works and what it offers:
Getting Insights For Learning Evaluation
The aptly-named Reports page is where you’ll find all Reports-related functionality.
eFront comes with a number of built-in, turn-key analytics that cover all major platform entities: the overall System, Users, Courses, Curriculum, Tests, Surveys, SCORM units, and Certificates. There’s also a Timeline-style report that serves as a log — tracking system and learner-related events.
Upon entering the Reports page, you’ll be greeted with an overview of statistics for the current day (users active, course completion, logins, etc.), courtesy of the Systems Report.
Like in all other reports, there’s a filter button in the top left that lets you narrow the scope of the learning evaluation according to a set of criteria. Filtering is a powerful tool that allows you to “zoom-in” and get reporting only about the subset of the overall activity that you’re interested in, and further explore the performance of e.g. a particular Branch, User type, Audience, Group, etc.
Equally important are the date options, which allow you to focus on a particular time span. You can select one of several quickly accessible predefined time periods (Today, Yesterday, Week, Month, Year) or ask to see the data for a custom period.
Also available in the various Report tabs is an “Export” button, which allows you to save the eLearning analytics you see in a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file, that can be imported into Excel, processed with a large number of tools (e.g. popular statistics packages like R and SPSS), or even manipulated programmatically.
Let’s see filtering in more detail:
See Only What You Need
As we already mentioned, Filters are a powerful tool for working with reporting, as they allow you to narrow down the available information to just the items that you want to see or that warrant further examination.
You can access the filtering panel in any Report tab by clicking the button with the little siphon icon labeled “Filter“.
The panel that will pop up allows you to define a list of criteria, and use them to narrow down the reporting (e.g. constrain the statistics shown to a particular Group or to a number of specific Branches).
Filter Criteria include items such as User Type, Group, Job, Skill, Audience, and Branch. You can also specify whether you want to include sub-branches and whether to constrain your report to just the active users or users that have been idle for more than a number of days.
For example, to just see learning measurement figures about the learners of a specific Branch in your report, visit the User report tab, open the Filter panel, select the Branch that you are interested in, and then click “Submit”.
From now on, and for as long as the filter is active, any statistics and graphs you see in the resulting report will only track the users belonging to that particular Branch.
For any active filter, the applied criteria are shown as small tags on a special filter bar (e.g.: Branch: NY Offices). Clicking on the “X” next to one of these will disable that particular criterium.
You can also save filters so that you can access them at a later stage with a single click from the Filter button (which also serves as a drop-down menu). To save a custom filter click on the green “Save Filter” option on the filter and enter a name for your saved filter (e.g. “Branch X users”) on the dialog that appears.
Automate Your Day-to-Day
Aside from going into the eLearning reports section and checking stuff yourself, you can also arrange for reports to come to you (or your company’s CEO, or any stakeholder in your training program).
Specifically, eFront allows you to schedule reports to be automatically emailed at a certain frequency to a list of recipients.
To arrange for the System report (overall eFront portal statistics) to be periodically emailed, visit the System reports tab, and click the caret next to the “Export” button to select the “Schedule” options you want.
A popup will appear, allowing you to determine the start date, send time and frequency (e.g. every day at 09:00), and the list of recipients. Clicking the “Schedule” button at the bottom of the popup will now activate the newly configured reporting schedule.
LMS Reporting and Mass Actions
eFront’s “Mass Actions” feature refers to the platform’s ability to bundle similar actions (e.g. enrolling multiple users to a course) and allow administrators to perform them with a single command.
Mass Actions eliminate repetitive work by automating tasks that need to be performed to multiple users (e.g. to all members of a group, or to all learners enlisted to a particular course). The scope of a Mass Action (which users it should impact) is determined by the powerful filtering options we’ve already covered.
To access the feature, visit the Users tab in Reports — you’ll find there a “Mass Actions” dropdown. You can click to open and see the available mass actions (just don’t run one yet, unless you really want to perform it).
The first step before running a Mass Action is to determine the users we want it to affect. We can do this using the Filter function to select users belonging to a specific Type, having some specific Job or Skill, or belonging to one or more Groups, Audiences or Branches (the unfiltered default, is of course, “all users”).
After you’ve used the filters to select only the desired users, you can now apply one of the available Mass Actions to them, which include:
- Enroll users to a specific course
- Un-enroll users from a course
- Add users to a group
- Remove users from a group
- Send users a message
- Deactivate or Activate users
- Archive users
Depending on the Mass Action you’ve selected, you will be asked to specify some more input (e.g. pick the course you want to enroll the users to, or enter the message you want to send them).
Powerful LMS Reporting Features
eFront’s flexible and customizable reporting capabilities give administrators insight into their talent development program, allowing them to keep track of users, courses, tests, and over offers a chance for an evaluation of learning and everything else that concerns or affects their training regimen.
Through an intuitive interface, eFront administrators have the option to see just what they need to, via Filters, Export the data for sharing or further processing, perform mass actions on reported users, and even schedule automated report emails. LMS reporting tools really can help you pinpoint problem areas or great successes in your courses and student roster, and take appropriate, targeted action.