Measuring success of online education

The educational system seems to play an important role in defining success for people, and online education has its fare share of this. But what makes online education successful, and how can we measure it?

1. Success of online education for schools

   Online education can provide a higher interactivity between students, teachers and learning materials, and also more feedback. This means there are more things to be measured.

   Schools have a plethora of metrics for their online education programs: engagement rates with learning materials, completion rates of courses, students' scores on tests, graduation rates, and so on. They need to measure everything in order to personalize their instructional practices and constantly improve all these metrics.

2. Success of online education for the employment world

   Employers look for a set of skills in the new hires, besides work experience. The success for entry-level employees is based a lot on their ability to gain in-depth knowledge of new subjects, research and analyze data, and apply learning in real world situations.

   When this set of skills is completed by a natural usage of various tech devices and online tools, new employees find it easier to adapt to the working environment and be better performers.

3. Success of online education for students

   Students want schools to adapt more to their learning needs, not the other way around. One size does not fit all. They want diverse credentials and certificates that reflect the many ways in which they learn and demonstrate mastery.

   Students want personalized learning experiences. Online education can make this possible, by giving educators the possibility to use big data and powerful analytics and reporting tools, thus meeting all students' learning needs.

4. In the end...

   Successful online education means offering personalized learning experiences to students, which will impact schools' metrics, which will adapt and impact the employment world metrics.

   Of course, all stakeholders must work together, and take into account each other's needs when setting their success metrics.

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