4 Steps to Prioritize and Track Blended Learning Experiences

Step 1: Identify Blended Learning Experiences

The first step is to pinpoint the learning programs or areas that you want to explore further. This might be:

Blended Learning Activities

Perhaps you’re creating an L&D program to support the sales team for the launch of a new product line. Where else might the sales team learn about the product outside of your program?

Core Competencies & Skills

Perhaps you already know about a resource learners use to develop core competencies. Alternatively, you may want to track a particular type of experience to see what skills and competencies are being developed.

Organizational Goals & Priorities

Do you want to explore any particular areas that are relevant to your organization's overall strategic priorities?

Regardless of your motivation for wanting to collect data about specific experiences, it’s important to make sure you know what you want to track and why. Otherwise, you may be wasting time and resources.

If necessary, talk to or survey people in your organization about where they think informal training takes place. In addition to developing a list of potential trackable experiences, you'll get a better understanding of where and how these experiences are happening.

Step 2: Track Informal Learning Experiences

Now that you’ve identified what you want to track, it’s time to design and implement that tracking and reporting. Let’s find the most appropriate tracking methods for your high-priority learning activities. First, consider:

• what data needs to be captured,
• how reliable that data needs to be, and
• the approximate cost associated with your preferred tracking method.

Keep in mind, cost and effort increase as you track more types of experiences—but not necessarily the number of the same experience types. For example, if you’re already capturing data about classroom training on one subject, it may be worthwhile to track all classroom work-based learning at the same time.

Equally, if you want to dig into a particular competency, tracking all of the related learning experiences across multiple channels is likely to be a lot of work. Instead, choose one channel and consider looking into a range of relevant competencies.

Step 3: Explore Your Blended Learning Data

You can’t improve learning experiences without first gaining important insights from captured data. In this post, we’ll explain the different questions and potential insights you might gain from various data sources.

Ask Questions, Get Insights

Knowing how to monitor and analyze your learning experiences is key to gaining useful insights from a data source. As you add more data sources, you should find even more insights, which might include discovering unexpected correlations across multiple data sources. Or, you might use data from one source to answer questions that arise from studying data from another source.

Depending on the questions you ask and the data you collect, you might find insights like these:

• People who are more active in one type of learning experience are more/less likely to be active in another.
• Certain competencies are being developed more frequently via informal learning than other competencies.
• Some people are learning about areas that are more relevant to other roles within the organization.
• Certain learning experiences have positive, negative, or neutral effects on job performance.
• Certain learning resources are popular or not used at all.
• More learning experiences are recorded at certain times of the day or year.

Step 4: Use L&D Metrics to Adjust Learning Programs

Now that you’re on your way to capturing and learning from your data, it’s time to start making adjustments to your L&D programs. The appropriate course of action will depend on your particular situation and the insights you’ve gained. For instance:

1. Connect different blended learning experiences to encourage learners to try both types.
   Example: Recommend a PDF resource at the end of a video or promote groups of resources together.
2. Increase the visibility of certain resources, platforms, and experiences.
   Example: This could be sharing a commonly used resource by successful salespeople to all the members of the sales team.
3. Investigate and prevent the spread of misinformation and incorrect approaches.
   Example: If a team is less successful in one area of work, interview that team to explore reasons for their limited success rates.
4. Inform managers to have career-planning discussions with their teams.
   Example: Learning data can enable managers to identify their team members who are developing skills required for new roles.
5. Remove or improve unpopular learning materials.
   Example: If only one division is using a subscription to learning materials, consider canceling the subscription for divisions that aren’t using it.
6. Investigate what makes certain learning programs popular.
   Example: If the most-watched videos use engaging thumbnail images, whereas the least popular videos use random or dull thumbnails, you can research the relationship between video thumbnails and video popularity. (See how Netflix does this type of research.)

Up Next: How to Capture & Track Social Learning

Now that you know all four steps in the prioritization process, you can repeat this cycle on all of your learning experiences. And in our next post, we’ll explain how to capture and track social learning within your organization.