How to Measure the Effectiveness of an Online Training Program?

According to a report from Flexpile, there has been a 48% increase in freelance market in 2018. And after COVID hit the world in 2019 and everything was shifted to digital, there has been a 78% increase in freelance market. And since then freelancing has been very popular among people to make money from the comfort of their homes.

Thus in order to get creative and to learn new skills people have been undertaking a lot of online training programs. Especially since COVID, online learning has seen a serious boom in its growth from around the world. There are a lot of platforms like Udemy, Coursera, FutureLearn, Pluralsight, edX that serve millions of people to help them in quenching their thirst of knowledge. Top tier universities like Harvard and Stanford also have given access to people to their online courses. According to Forbes, Udemy has earned over $50 Million in subscriptions alone in the year 2019. You might be also interested in the Comparison between Onsite Training Vs Online Training.

This clearly shows that online learning and training programs have taken over the education field by storm. But there are two things that we need to be pondering about at this moment.

• Whether these courses are fruitful or not?
• And how to measure the effectiveness of these courses?

According to the media company USA Today almost 63% of the students pass online learning courses with flying colors. And only a meagre amount of 9% students are unable to pass such online training programs. Now we come to our second question, how to measure the effectiveness of such courses.

• Ways to Measure the Effectiveness of an Online Training Program
  • Tally Count
  • Thorough Test
  • Utilizability of the Skill
  • Student Feedback
• Advantages of Measuring the Effectiveness of an Online Training Program

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Ways to Measure the Effectiveness of an Online Training Program

Tally Count:

One of the most effective ways we can check the effectiveness of an online learning program is the tally count method. It is a live method to check whether a program is effective or not. In the pulse check method you actually keep a tally of the attendees that join the training program in the start. And the frequency with which they keep on attending the class in the further weeks. If the number of attendees rises or stay the same then it means that students are gaining something from the program and that the program is a success. If the number of students fall, then it points out that the program could not deliver properly.

Another tally count method is to check the engagement of the students during the sessions by simple activities. If the students engage, then it means they are all effectively taking the online sessions.

Thorough Test:

Probably one of the most accurate ways to measure the effectiveness of an online training program is to take a thorough test of the students. And this test must be designed in a way that it would cover the entire course content. Thus it would give a complete idea as to what extent the students have learned from the online training program. Therefore, it will also indirectly point towards the effectiveness of the online training program.

If most of the students ace the test, then it would be safe to say that the online training program was pretty effective. But if majority of the students enrolled in the program do not take the test or perform poorly in the test then it would mean that the online program was not much effective and students did not take it seriously.

Another upside to this method of measuring the effectiveness of a program is to award a certificate on the basis of the test that you took. Not only would this appeal the students to take the program more seriously, but it would also add to the effectiveness of the program.

Utilizability of the Skill:

Another method, and certainly very effective one is to keep a record of the students that utilized their skill further to land a job in their desired domain. In this method we simply keep a record of students who learned a particular skill and then used this skill to get the job they wanted. Then we can simply form a graph of total students versus the students who got a job by using their learned skill. If we get a high ratio, then it means our online training program is a success. And if the numbers are low, then unfortunately the program is not that effective and changes need to be made.

We can explain this by using simple examples. For example, if 1000 students take up an online course of graphics designing. And then after the course if 700 or 700+ students are able to bag a graphic designing job than it is safe to say that the program is a success. But if only a small amount of students like mere 100-150 are able to get a graphic designing related job then we can conclude that the effectiveness of the program is not up to the mark.

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Student Feedback:

Student feedback is also one of the ways to measure the effectiveness of a program. In this method you can use active feedback or passive feedback method to measure the effectiveness of the online training program. In active feedback method a person personally meets the participants and asks them questions and records their feedback about the program. In passive feedback method, a generic feedback form is developed and sent to all the participants and then their feedback is recorded.

But there is a basic problem with the feedback method. It can have three possible outcomes:

• If the majority of the participants give a positive feedback, then the program will be easily classified as a successful program
• If majority of the students give a negative feedback, then the program will unfortunately be regarded as a failure.
• If we get a mix feedback, then it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of the program.

Now the problem here is that when we get a mixed feedback it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of the program. We can neither classify it as successful program nor a flop. Therefore, feedback is not an accurate method to measure the effectiveness of a program and it should be avoided if possible and other methods should be employed.

Advantages of Measuring the Effectiveness of an Online Training Program:

1. By measuring the effectiveness, we can learn whether to keep our program as such or make amends to it.
2. We can also use this to promote our program to the people who are looking for an effective training program.
3. Another advantage of measuring the effectiveness is to get rid of the negative aspects and to promote the positive aspects.

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