The latest episode of the Digital Adoption Show features Gokul Suresh Head of Growth and Field Marketing at Whatfix and Peter Manniche Riber on The Secret Sauce to Learning Analytics.
2:27 – What is learning analytics and why do you think there is a huge need to evangelize it in the learning and HR community?
- Through learning analytics, you got some completion data on what people are learning in training, and what activities people are mostly engaging in, this probably might not be in the formal space. But also collect data on the informal stuff it’s not really learning activities. But it’s definitely things people do in the context of learning
- Most data are derived from Learning Management systems, learning experience platforms, or whatever systems you have to collect activity on what people are doing on the platform. But that’s only going to be vanity metrics
- We need to go out and collect data on sales performance, safety, production efficiency and deviances in production, all sorts of business KPIs or indicators, telling us what performance is in the context of where people work, because when we correlate those two things and put them together, we will be able to say if there is a correlation, and we have to make sure that we separate correlation from causation
10:04 – Framework To Create an Effective Learning Analytics Strategy?
- You need a data lake, simply put a repository of learning data of training and activities, people data, and behavioural data. So how are people interacting with the systems in your company, like on teams or Yamm or Google suite?
Secondly, How are people accessing these systems, what are people searching on SharePoint, and what are people interested in? Now, analysis can give trends, and trending stuff on Yamm, and you can do all sorts of things that don’t violate privacy but is kind of an analysis of what’s going on - You can access the data anonymously, and can still manage to identify areas where things are travelling better than others. Then you can ask some questions on whether can we see any patterns in training and learning that can help it already with the stuff we historically know. What do we need to design something that can change the rating from X to Y? Then, we should focus on working from there. That offset is much better than just the gut feeling around we need a leadership course
- Lori Niles-Hofmann is one of the people I will mention that you guys should follow. She’s doing some of that work around data-informed/ data-driven Learning Design, where you can actually get insights from the sources to create your training, which is a different turnaround
26:33 – What are the skill sets required for learning analytics positions?
- It requires fundamental strategic skills but the hands-on thing that is super underrated is collecting data. if you’re starting all over and need some data proficiency, you need to know what data analytics is and what it isn’t. You need to know how to handle data in the systems that you’re choosing because there are multiple tools to choose from
- We use Alteryx for pulling the data and structuring it and getting it through the funnels cleaning up the data and loading it into the visualization tools. Tools like Power BI help us interpret data into dashboards, where we are interpreting the data for people, visualising trends, and all sorts of correlations and connections
- Most importantly, the journey around structuring data and looking into data systems requires an exciting curiosity as to how to handle that and a little bit of patience, because it doesn’t come super easy
Tune in to the interesting conversation here > The Secret Sauce to Learning Analytics
Peter Manniche Riber is Head of Digital Learning and Analytics at Novo Nordisk. He has been working with digital learning for more than 10 years and has a strong devotion for L&D and how to make it accountable.
