Program measurement

- How will you define success for your learning program? By how many people pass the assessments, or the cost at it which it was built and delivered? The point being, there are many ways to interpret success. Because of that, we have to define it for each learning program that we want to measure. Learning program measurement builds on learner and learning experience measurement to collect data that informs whether or not an entire learning program was successful. Without defining success, it's nearly impossible to know which data will be relevant for collection. In designing measurement for a learning program, it helps to follow a logic model to build a chain of evidence from learning experiences and activities to expected outcomes or impacts. Think of a logic model as a road map connecting related events with the planned results. For everything we identify in the road map, we'll need to collect data about it to ensure it's measured. Let's apply this road map to our case study. We've been tasked with training location managers on a new production-management software at Souder Manufacturing. The road map begins with establishing your resources or inputs, in other words, what are the resources needed to initiate the program? For Souder Manufacturing, the resources are the LMS, the collaboration platform, the coaching tool, and the enterprise-planning software itself. The inputs are courses, learning assets, coaches, and time spent creating the learning. Assuming you have access to these resources, the next phase of the road map is asking how are the resources used to accomplish certain activities? Within the logic model, this is likely to be where curriculum or learning path is defined. For Souder Manufacturing, we would create a curriculum of finance and operational concepts as well as optional peer-to-peer experiences of this phase. Next, in the road map, we wanta figure out what we expect as a result of these program activities. Defining how you expect the learners to benefit from doing these activities provides the metrics and measurement framework for what data you need to demonstrate the intended results. When considering Souder Manufacturing, we want to know what will immediately happen after managers complete their program. Do we expect them to have better managerial competencies in software acumen? The last phase of our logic model road map is to explore the outcomes and impact of the expected benefits to learners. If learners build the skills or talents we've described in the results phase, how do we predict that impacts the organization? Applying this final phase to Souder, we want to assess what organizational outcomes will improved skills lead to. I would argue that this information would likely lead to improvements in financial and operating metrics key to overall organizational performance. Answering this sequence of questions provides you with specific and relevant questions needed to answer if your learning program was successful. Then you will have the information to determine what data can measure the success of a learning program.