Of course, this part comes with many benefits for everybody. For instance, by understanding how your learners are interacting with your course, you’ll be able to know whether or not they are getting the objective of your lesson. That’s not all; if you find out things aren’t going on well after tracking their behavior, you’ll be able to rework and create a better eLearning experience that will most benefit your learners. The importance of tracking your learners’ behavior can’t be overstressed.

One of the few ways to know how your learners are interacting with your course is by using the customized reporting capabilities of your LMS. However, this method isn’t as effective as using learning analytics. Unlike LMS, whose “activity-based” reports only point out a few substandard trends, learning analytics provide more actionable insights into trends. Read on to find out everything you need to know about learning analytics and their importance in digital learning.

Here’s what you need to know about learning analytics

Learning analytics is an evidence-based technique that involves understanding and evaluating the relevant data regarding your learners’ progress. One of the many benefits of this approach is it helps to support and improve the learning experience for your learners.

Furthermore, according to George Siemens, learning analytics is the “measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data for learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs.” In the eLearning industry, learning analytics offer several amazing benefits to both instructors and learners. Let’s find out some of them below:

1.    Prediction of learners’ future performance

One of the benefits of learning analytics in the eLearning space is that it enables you to better predict your learners’ performance. For instance, if after tracking your learners’ progress, you found out that an individual performs poorly on an assessment. This could mean that the person needs extra support to perform better on the job.

So, the bottom line is, with learning analytics, you’ll be able to gain better insights into how your learners are performing. That’s not all; you’ll also understand exactly what your learners need to perform their job functions properly.

2.    Personalized eLearning experience

Another thing that’s in it for you when you use learning analytics is that it’ll enable you to provide your learners with a personalized eLearning experience. If you don’t know, personalized learning is a type of learning that involves customizing and adapting the learning experience to better suit the learning needs of each of your learners. One of the benefits of this approach is it helps to improve the knowledge retention ability of the students. Apart from that, a personalized learning experience also helps to increase the engagement levels of the learners.

For you to deliver personalized learning for your learners, you need to research them to fully understand their needs. This is where the need for learning analytics comes into the scene. By tracking your learners’ progress, you’ll be able to understand how they interact with your course. That’s not all; you’ll also get to understand their learning styles as well as their needs. All of these and many more will help you to deliver the much-needed personalized learning experience that most of them often crave.

3.    Boost learners’ retention ability

With learning analytics, another thing that you’ll be able to do is to boost your learners’ retention ability. For those who don’t know, learners’ retention is an approach that involves transferring new or fresh information into the long-term memory of your students. With learning analytics, you’ll be able to fully understand the progress of your learners. If after getting their data, you noticed that most of them end up not completing the course, it most likely means your course isn’t engaging enough.

With that, all you need to do is to rework your course and create more interactive learning content – this will help to boost your learners’ knowledge retention ability and push them to complete the course.

4.    Identify your learners’ weaknesses

You’ll surely agree with me that the first move to provide your learners with the best learning experience is by understanding their strengths and weaknesses. Of course, you’ll be able to do that with learning analytics. After fully understanding the strengths and weaknesses, what remains of you is to provide relevant resources to help them through their struggles. This way, you’ll be able to provide your learners with the best learning experiences.

How to successfully implement learning analytics

For you to implement learning analytics successfully for eLearning, here are a few things that you need to put in mind.

• First, you’ll need to start by defining the objectives for analytics.
• Up next, tailor the appropriate metrics to the objectives. Of course, here’s where you need to decide how to measure your learners’ progress.
• After that, you need to proceed to determine your resources capacity for implementation.
• Next, strategize how to roll out the necessary resources.
• Lastly, create milestones for monitoring your learners’ progress.