Live from Blackboard World: A New E-Learning Metrics Model July 16, 2009
By Margery Weinstein
Measuring return on investment and whether instructors met the learning demands managers outlined isn't enough, Noureddine Elouazizi, e-learning technologies advisor for the Business Information Systems department of CGA-Canada, said today at Blackboard World in National Harbor, MD.
Instead, Elouazizi proposed measuring the success of online training by looking at the cognitive aspects of learning, or the process the learner goes through to absorb the material. The problem with focusing on ROI or examining how well learners pass assessments, said Elouazizi, is measuring ROI is "human resources-centric" and the other approach is "market-driven." To understand what your learners need in the online classes you put together, focus your attention on how their brains appear to process the information. "You have to concentrate on the cognitive aspects of learning because that is where the learning is happening," he said.
Elouazizi calls his approach a "transformational generative e-learning metrics model" that looks at how far along in the process of learning instructors got learners, rather than whether the company earned a specific amount of money from the investment in the learning or whether the learners were able to pass exams. He suggested that if your job was to take learners from point "A" to "E," and you got them to "C" or "D," all was not lost because you moved them further along in the process of learning. The online materials in that case furthered the cognition process.
Assumptions of this transformational model include recognizing that the "dimensions of e-learning metrics are inherently fuzzy; the overall output of the e-learning metrics is e-learning quality as transformation; and that e-learning metrics measure converging transitions across the learning state."
It seemed like the online training world's parallel of the old axiom about the journey counting at least as much, if not more, than the destination. It's what you learned along the way (in the process of learning) that counts rather than if you made it to a pre-determined end-point.
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