Bad data creates faulty decision-making. To improve your learning designs, you need good data. Unfortunately, many learning-evaluation methods are seriously flawed.

It's not every day L&D professionals get to spend time in the trenches conducting a true needs analysis, learning firsthand about the needs of leaders and the barriers that impact their performance.  We did and survived to share what we learned, translating this analysis into customized yet scalable performance-based solutions. The strength of leadership at the mid-level is critical to employee engagement and organizational success.

Demonstrating the value of training and eLearning is a common challenge for instructional designers and eLearning developers. ROIs and cost-benefit analyses are almost never done, and KPIs often aren’t used to measure performance changes. However, using data to understand the results of your projects and approaches and then share them with others can do a lot to help others see what benefits come from your team’s work.

Do the executives who fund learning and development care how many courses you have? Or how many students? Or the number of class hours you’ve delivered? Actually, they may react negatively to those numbers. Most of the time, when people are in training their productivity is zero. The key question is how to get to Level 4 and measure actual impact.

As xAPI gains traction in the learning space and is incorporated into more authoring tools, apps, and enterprise systems, the specification is making a transition into easy, widespread use. However, if you’re looking to better use it at your organization, you may be wondering how to develop a strategy to implement meaningful xAPI.

L&D has wrestled with the idea of measuring impact for decades. Unfortunately, most of the methods used as “proof” of impact are simple correlations. And most people know the adage “correlation does not equal causation.” This session will help participants understand different, more practical types of analytics, and how they can provide much more impactful insights than simple correlations.

You’ve heard about xAPI but wonder what comes next. Getting from this initial position of interest to widespread organizational buy-in can be a huge challenge. How do you justify taking resources away from creating and curating learning experiences to build something new and unproven? It can be a challenge to identify the first steps needed to start convincing stakeholders that the investment is worth it. xAPI is a complex solution, and there is no road map that an organization can follow. Everyone is looking for the best ways to use project management strategies to leverage the resources they have access to, so they can achieve those first “wins” in the process of implementing xAPI.

You’re an instructional designer who cares about the efficacy of your course—in other words, you want to make sure your users are actually learning something. You start writing some multiple-choice questions and throw in some true/false questions for good measure. This is just what you do for educational assessment, right? Stop here for a second. Do you understand why you’re doing that? Are you interested in some alternative methods for assessing your learners?

As more learning and training is delivered online, instructors and trainers no longer have the opportunity to get to know all their learners by meeting them face-to-face. This disconnect often leads to missing or ineffective assessments as eLearning developers increasingly hope their learners understand the content, but lack the tools to adequately measure the level of understanding. How do you know if your eLearning assessments are effective? Are you testing learners’ content knowledge, or do your assessments measure their deduction skills? In this session, you will explore common test-writing pitfalls and discover how smart test-takers excel without learning the content.

xAPI has been around for a few years. You’ve been hearing about what it is and how it’s used in a conceptual sense. But what about the real world? This session will discuss a company that has made a long-term investment of time and money in existing learning technologies. They were interested in leveraging xAPI but had questions: What could they track with xAPI? Would they need to scrap everything and redesign from scratch? Could they use their current rapid development tools, or did they need to learn a new technology? What benefits could they realize from xAPI?