Corporate learning is continuously evolving, but what's certain is that learning management systems (LMSs) are the preferred technology, with 82% of organizations using it. It's a big step forward for companies with many employees working remotely from various parts of the globe.
Learning is much easier with the help of LMSs as they make e-learning courses available and accessible for all employees. The challenge is ensuring that learning objectives are met and that learners reach the skill levels necessary to perform well in their roles.
With learners having unprecedented autonomy, LMS assessments must be truly indicative of the levels of mastery achieved through the e-learning courses. Furthermore, L&D professionals depend on these assessments to demonstrate the effectiveness of every training program they deploy.
Your platform offers many ways to create LMS assessments
Assessments are necessary but generally don't make for crowd-pleasers. Many adult learners still think of their sometimes stressful formative years whenever they come across the words "quiz," "test," or "multiple choice." Furthermore, instructional designers need to ensure that the online assessment results are accurate and accurately measure learner progress.
This is where a good LMS comes in handy, as it has many options to cater to learners' needs and make the evaluation process engaging and fun. The many types of LMS assessments, as well as the possibility to customize them, are essential for the success of corporate training programs.
Best practices for creating LMS assessments
Online evaluations come with several challenges and there are several pitfalls instructors need to avoid. Here are some helpful tips about creating LMS assessments:
Allow multiple attempts
The point of the training is for them to remember and apply the information, not to get it right on the first try. When the first answer is incorrect, the learner has to rethink the question and revisit the information, leading to a better understanding.
Use the automated grading option
Automated grading eases the instructor's workload. Adult learners want autonomy — to feel like they are in charge of their learning. When the assessments are auto-grated, the results are immediate, thus keeping learners engaged with the content.
Enrich with gamification
Learners can earn points and badges for completing assessments. The gamification of training motivates them to pass each assessment, and they're also rewarded automatically for their good results or attempts.
Make use of learning analytics
LMS assessment results offer valuable insight into the effectiveness of training. They also hold the key to identifying knowledge gaps and content areas that are either too difficult or too easy. By employing the platform's learning analytics features, you can get comprehensive reports to showcase a specific program's strong and weak points.
Use competency-based training
Corporate training and development focuses on building skills and competencies that employees need in the workplace. Ideally, your platform has a competency-based learning feature that you can use to ensure every e-learning course is built to evaluate clear and specific competencies.
See how easy it is to create an assessment in the CYPHER Learning platform
9 Types of assessments you can create in your LMS
There are several types of assessments you can create in your LMS. The one you choose has to fit learners and the content of the online course. The format of your e-learning course will primarily determine which types of assessments will be suitable. Depending on the structure and subject of your course, you might want to include one or a mix of these assessments:
1. Quizzes
Quizzes allow learners to answer a set of questions. There are many question types that you can add to a quiz, including the common true or false, multiple choice, and fill-in-the-blanks. You also have freeform, matching and even hotspot question options if you need something more advanced.
Even better, instructors can add questions from question banks, which are collections of questions that instructors can create and store for repeated uses.
Quizzes can also be graded automatically, which means that instructors just assign correct and wrong answers to each question and don't have to worry about manual grading. Learners get instant results and can try multiple times.
2. Offline
Offline assessments don't require online submissions. It can be anything from reading a book, a case study, or working on a project.
The learners can let the instructor know when they are done with the task by marking it as "completed." This will remove it from the learner's to-do list. Subsequently, the instructor will grade each learner based on the results of the assigned offline work.
3. Discussion
Setting up a discussion assessment encourages learners to participate by answering a discussion thread started by the instructor. The best part is that they can earn points and even work towards achieving mastery of a competency.
This way, you can avoid copy-paste interactions where most participants give the same answers to a question.
4. Team
This type of assessment asks groups of learners to work on joint submissions. The instructor splits the learners into teams, each with a private group. This space can be used for collaboration of their submissions.
Once the team task is completed, the instructor can grade each learner based on participation and the end result. Team assessments are great tools for fostering collaboration and social learning.
5. Survey
A survey assessment gives the learner a set of questions that can be either multiple-choice or free-form. Post-training surveys are often the most popular, but you can use surveys to conduct training needs assessments and check learner engagement while they're taking the course.
6. Dropbox
This is an excellent medium for submitting lengthier files (like PDFs) and for building learning portfolios. These are important for more complex competencies (such as project management, for example) and also allow for collaboration and feedback.
For example, if the training program is aimed at building online marketing skills, the learners may be asked to build a campaign and submit it for review.
7. Debate
Debate assessments might not seem like the first choice regarding corporate learning. However, when the training is about developing skills such as critical analysis or out-of-the-box thinking, this assessment is perfect.
Allowing the learners to add arguments for or against a statement is the best way to get a conversation going and foster collaboration and constructive feedback.
8. H5P
H5P assessments are great when you need to make the evaluation process more engaging and when there are additional resources (such as videos). Apart from the "wow" factor of adding media content, these types of assessments are highly customizable.
9. Peer-reviewed
Social learning is essential to training success. For our CYPHER Learning platform for Business, we teamed up with Turnitin — a cloud-based platform that performs originality checking, online grading, and peer review. It is a real-time-saver for instructors, providing varied and relevant feedback to learners.
Bonus assessment options
- LTI stands for Learning Tools Interoperability. It allows for the integration of other learning tools with the LMS while deploying and assessing training programs. You can use external resources such as courses, videos, audio content, maps, assessments, badges, etc.
- SCORM stands for Shareable Content Object Reference Model. If assessments meet the SCORM standard for LMSs, they can be shared on any platform. Any assessment can be a SCORM assessment, and they work like third-party content you create with various other tools – like Adobe Captivate or PowerPoint.
Conclusion
LMSs offer L&D specialists and instructors an ideal environment for assessing learner skills. The platforms optimize otherwise time-consuming tasks such as grading quizzes, offering instant feedback, or plagiarism checks.
If you need quick, engaging, and customizable LMS assessments, check out the CYPHER Learning platform, which features 15 assessment types, automation, rich analytics and competency-based learning.
Schedule a demo to discuss how we can help you evaluate your training programs and individual learner performance.
