5 Ways to get Valuable Information from your Virtual Courses

Virtual learning environments, LMS for its acronym in English, are capable of storing a large amount of information that can be used to improve and personalize virtual courses.

With this data, e-Learning analytics are obtained, which is an important tool to obtain valuable information from your e-Learning courses.

Using analytics in your virtual course allows you to improve it, but it also helps students perform better through a more efficient educational experience.

In this blog post, I share some ways to obtain valuable information from your virtual courses.

What is e-Learning analytics?

e-Learning analytics is the set of data collected through educational technology when students use a virtual learning environment.

This system saves, analyzes, and measures the behavior of the students in order to offer important data about their preferences and the success or failure when interacting with the content and the platform.

For example, how much time does a student spend in each module, the student’s participation in activities such as forums and collaborative tasks, if they finished watching a video, etc?

From this data, inferences, investigations, and predictions can be made to improve the educational experience for the student, the tutor, the institution, and all those involved, both individually and in groups.

Some advantages of using analytics are:

Identify problems with some content
Discover learning patterns
Evaluate the effectiveness of the learning material
Monitor the learning process
Improve the environment, content, platform, and interaction

While the students work in the virtual learning environment, the system is saving valuable data to discover how they learn best and what is difficult for them, as well as their interests and preferences.

In this way, the educational quality is increased, the interest and motivation of the student’s increases, and costs are reduced by eliminating what does not produce results.

How do I get valuable information about my virtual course?

1. Analyzing how engaged the student is with your content

In face-to-face education, you can easily recognize the student involved. Shows interest, asks questions, answers, and stays attentive.

In virtual education, analytics are your eyes to assess the commitment and participation of the student.

You will be able to obtain information about how much time a student spends in your course, in which content they show the most interest if there is any confusion in any area of the course or a particular task is difficult for them.

With this information, you can not only make adaptations and changes that promote greater commitment to your course. You can also share the information with the student if necessary.

2. Designing the content in blocks

If you organize the content of your course in modules or blocks, it will be easier for you to use the information from the analytics system of your course.

You will be able to interpret properly if the student prefers video, audio, gamification, or text content

Do you stay on a certain activity or do you tend to skip those you don’t like? What type of material does the group spend more time on? Which module has been most useful?

With this data, you will be able to understand how students navigate through your course.

3. Giving timely feedback

The data obtained from the analytics has the advantage of being immediately available. With them, you can give important feedback to your student about the way they navigate through your course and consume the information.

Feedback is a very important factor in maintaining student motivation and interest.

You can even show him a graph that allows him to understand his behavior when learning and based on this motivate the student to self-reflection and self-regulation of his learning behavior.

The student will be able to understand their interests, set goals, and establish positive communication with you to help them in the process.

4. Using self-assessment strategically

In most cases, we want you to understand the importance of formative and summative evaluation in your virtual courses.

With the help of the analytics of your virtual course, it is possible to use formative evaluations periodically that will give you and your students valuable information before the course ends.

With this information, the student and you as a tutor will be able to understand what areas are difficult or easy for them, in what type of evaluation or questions they usually have more success.

You can also gather information about the type of quiz or assessment that works best for the content or course and whether formative assessments have translated into summative assessment success.

5. Using the information for research

Virtual learning systems offer you a large amount of data that, if accumulated, measured, and analyzed, can give you everything you need to carry out important research that allows you to improve education.

Digital technology continues to advance, don’t miss out on the opportunity to use the valuable information you can get from your virtual course on the internet.