Moneyball

The learning industry has recently caught the analytics bug, many of the articles citing either the movie or book 'Moneyball'. If professional sports analyze data to improve athletic performance, why aren’t corporations doing the same of the human capital assets that generate the value for their organization?

Digital Footprint

We live in a world where most of what we do online leaves some form of digital footprint. These trails can be harnessed and analyzed to provide deep insight. Learning analytics specifically looks into what is happening in the learning process and how it impacts success. However, as the industry is realizing, most learning is actually informal and actually embedded in work streams. It is becoming clear that analysis of what is traditionally thought of as learning activities or events (formal learning) is a limited dataset for analytics.

Report Mashups

Standard reports in Accord LMS such as Role Activity - Most Active, Learner Activity - Most Active, LE Utilization - Most Utilized can provide great insight into what learning activities may be driving success, or what level of activity the most successful employees have in the system. However, it is the ability to extend Accord LMS reports with utilization data from any other applications running on the website that can truly unleash the power of data analytics. Applications can be added to allow users to engage in discussions, upload videos and rate content. This extends the traditional LMS reporting so that you have an understanding of what additional assets were most used by employees, and what value the users attached to them.

Report mashups are technically possible with other LMS systems and third party applications, as an administrator I can assure you that the integration with different applications is often extremely difficult. It is a tremendous challenge to get the parts speaking to each other in a manner that you can harness and standardize the data streams into meaningful information.

Strategic Advantage

As part of a larger www.DotNetNuke.com (DNN) ecosystem, the Accord LMS has a major strategic advantage. All DNN applications share the same framework, user IDs, roles and a common database. They are seamless extensions rather than Frankenstein-like grafts.  Hundreds of different applications (modules) are available from store.DotNetNuke.com.

What is most exciting to me is that, depending on how much the DNN platform drives your business, your data streams from project spaces and business performance can fully integrate with learning data reports. This is the pinnacle of learning analytics as seen by many; the majority of learning done in the workplace is the “learning which occurs as part of doing the work”. The Accord LMS provides a unique opportunity for businesses to harness and utilize this data more effectively than users of traditional LMS systems.