The 7 Most Important Online Course Metrics You Need to Track

Congratulations, you’ve created an online course! Now, you can sit back, watch the enrollments pour in, and let things run on autopilot, right?

Well, not quite.

A big part of creating an successful online course actually takes place after you’ve launched it. You need to track various online course metrics so you can see how many people are enrolling in your course, how they’re engaging with the materials, the effectiveness of your course, and so on.

As a teacher myself, I’m going to share some of the most important online course metrics you should be tracking on an ongoing basis to make your class a success.

Why is it Important to Track Online Course Metrics?

Course metrics can help you assess the effectiveness of your course’s content and the level of engagement of the learners.

With the right metrics, you can be sure that the course material keeps the students engaged, challenges them, and helps them achieve the goals they have. 

If your course seems valuable to your audience and delivers what is promised, it can become a valuable digital asset for you. This asset can give you earnings for at least some time to come before it needs updating. 

Additionally, if you’re creating courses for organizations for training purposes, measuring course success is important for client reporting. 

In both these cases, metrics can help you make changes to your course to perfect it according to the requirements of your target audience.

Essential Online Metrics to Track

Tracking the success of your online course can be quite tricky. Even though enrollments and course completions are simple ways to calculate course success, they translate to satisfaction and engagement.

So, for your ease, here are the most important metrics that will help you track the success of your course: 

1. Course Enrollments

Course enrollments are the simplest metric to track the success of your online course. Sometimes, even the best courses don’t get a lot of enrollments because either they aren’t being marketed to the right audience or the marketing copy isn’t impressive. 

So, tracking enrollments is the first step to assessing how the audience is responding to the course you’ve created. With an LMS like LearnDash, you can assess the enrollments you are getting in your course over time. 

While enrollments are a simple way to assess your course’s success, they aren’t the only metric you should track. For starters, even if you’re getting the enrollments and students are completing your course doesn’t mean that they were completely satisfied with it.

Sometimes, great marketing copy and over-the-top promises could get you enrollments but result in dissatisfied learners. So just know that course enrollments alone don’t always paint a clear picture of the course’s success. 

2. Course Progression

Students who progress through a course at a good pace are supposed to be engaged and invested in the course. Three metrics can help gauge the course progression of students enrolled in the course:

• Module completion
• Time spent on tasks
• Assessment performance

If the students submit assignments on time, do not skip modules, and spend the allotted time on tasks in between the course modules, they will likely be engaged.

However, here are some other questions that can help you gauge course progression:

• How long does it take for learners to complete each module?
• Which topics and concepts seem easy and which ones seem hard?
• Which parts of the course do learners drag the most?

3. Exit Surveys and Reviews

You can get reviews about your course in a number of ways including exit surveys, reviews, and polls. These are some of the most important online course metrics of them all.

Exit surveys 

Even though the above metrics can help you to get an idea about your course’s content and engagement, exit surveys can paint a much clearer picture of what your course lacks. 

You can get exit surveys from two types of learners – those who complete the course and those who leave the course without finishing up. 

Abandoning learners 

Even top-rated courses have unsatisfied learners or those who cancel or leave halfway. Some people might not find the course matches their expectations while some might experience a shift in motivations and circumstances.

 If you’ve created a course using LearnDash, you can set an expiration date for course access. The learner can be notified about the expiring access so they are prompted to complete the course. Once the access expires and they haven’t completed the lectures, an exit survey can help understand whether the abandonment was because of changed motivations or because of dissatisfaction with the course content. 

In any case, an exit survey can help understand if the issue was with the course content and make changes accordingly.

Post completion surveys

Those who don’t complete the course might give an honest opinion if they’ve canceled their subscription or have no intent of resuming the course. However, those who complete the course will give their honest feedback once they know that it won’t impact their feedback. 

Here are some questions that can help you assess the course in a post-completion survey:

• Were the lectures appropriately paced?
• Was the course instructor engaging?
• Did you achieve the goals you set for yourself with this course?
• Would you recommend the course to a friend?

Reviews 

Reviews can help you establish credibility for your course and get an idea about what lacks and what works. A course design that obtains good reviews could be replicated for other courses too. On the other hand, if a course lacks something, changes can help improve reviews and ratings. 

With an LMS like LearnDash, you can add course reviews to get honest feedback from learners and attract new enrollments. However, informal forums on social media are also a great way to get feedback. 

During course polls 

You can also get feedback from learners throughout the course. However, make sure these surveys don’t require learners to allocate a lot of time. 

A simple poll or thumbs up, thumbs down option could be very helpful in assessing the learner experience and adjusting the course according to them. 

4. Instructor Effectiveness 

Instructors are one of the most critical contributors to the course experience. So, while you’re asking about the course content, conceptual clarity, and course pace, an important question to ask is whether the instructor was engaging or not. 

Even the best instructors might not be effective instructors in the online setting. So, apart from asking for feedback, you might also want to monitor how instructors are communicating with the learners and how effectively they are engaging online learners. 

This metric is most relevant to you if your course content is the same, but instructors change for each batch. Tracking this metric can help you get an idea of which instructor to retain. It can also help you assess whether a good instructor needs training to improve their communication in the online setting. 

5. Discussions 

Peer interactions are one of the most important aspects of learning in the classroom setting. In online courses, this experience might be greyed out. A great way that online courses now allow learners to interact is discussion forums. Here, learners can discuss course content amongst peers and discuss course material. 

In the discussion forums, you will find an opportunity to assess how learners are talking about the course material and assignments. You might also get feedback from the learners in these discussion threads and make changes to improve their experience.

6. Quiz and Assignment Scores

Tracking quiz scores is a great way to see how learners are progressing through the course. 

If learners are scoring well on quizzes and assignments, it indicates that they are grasping the concepts. However, too many perfect scores could also be an indication that the course is not challenging enough for learners. 

Assignment submissions and the quality of the assignments are also indicators of the course content. However, it is up to the instructors to leverage assignments to improve learner engagement and increase submission levels. 

To increase engagement, course instructors are advised to give consistent one-on-one feedback on each assignment. Timely feedback can help learners reflect on their tasks, stay engaged with the learning process, and achieve the course objectives. 

This metric could help you improve course content and assessments to help learners reap value from the course. 

The LearnDash LMS allows course creators to track and manage assignment submissions through its ProPanel add-on. Not only does this help track the number of assignment submissions, but also allows giving timely feedback to learners to enhance their learning experience. 

7. Track Employee Performance 

If you’ve designed a course for training purposes, a great way to gauge the success of the course is by tracking employee performance.

If the employee is implementing course learning while working, it reflects on the quality of the course. However, tracking employee performance can be quite tricky. 

Soft skill training courses don’t have a measurable impact on employee performance. In this case, tracking metrics like employee productivity, self-reflection, manager surveys, and HR metrics could be a few methods. 

Final Words

Even though there are multiple advantages to tracking online course metrics, it can be tricky business.

However, with a learning management system like LearnDash, you can create courses and track metrics like enrollments, assignment submissions, and reviews. With an easy-to-use drag-and-drop course builder, you can easily create custom courses for any application.

LearnDash even generates reports that offer a visual representation of course metrics. These reports are especially useful for course creators who need to report course success rates and ROI to organizations. 

So, whether you create courses for individual learners or organizations, LearnDash is your course companion.

Click here to try a demo and discover how LearnDash LMS can work for you.