I have been writing about the learning analytics process by using a simple example to demonstrate how it works. The Senior Leadership Team of XL Support (a fictional company) wants to know the company's compliance levels for statutory mandatory training across the organisation. In a previous post (which you can read here) we started out with the first step of the analytics process which is to define the question we want to answer or the problem we want to solve. The question to asnwer with data is:
What are the compliance levels for statutory mandatory training in percentages across the company?
Now that we know what question to answer the next thing is to identify what data is needed to answer the question and where to get the data from? The Head of Learning and Development, Larry discusses the data needed with his team and they agree that the data they need is statutory compliance training completions for everyone in the company and they can get the data from their Learning Management System (LMS). The LMS will provide a report of compliance training completed, but it's too detailed for the SLT and also does not show the percentages of completions across the organisation. The L&D team decide to export the data into Microsoft Excel and work on it to create the report that the SLT need. They will produce the report in a format that will be easy for the SLT to read, so they discuss a number of options that might help.
Larry has gone through the first two stages of the analytics process which is to:
- define the question that will be answered with data, and
- identify which data is needed to answer the question and where to get it from.
In the next post I will discuss preparing and analysing the data to answer the question.
