Data Strategy Workbook The world s most visual learning record store.
Introduction Tips to Use the Workbook: Recruit a group of 3-5 team members. Set aside a 60-90 minute meeting window. Provide a copy of this workbook to review in advance. Have a plan to capture brainstorm ideas! When developing a data strategy, many organizations will start by focusing on the gaps, challenges, issues, and lack of clarity that they currently have. While these factors are certainly what can drive the need for data management and reporting improvements, they are not the right place to start when setting the stage for a successful data initiative. Through our work with customers over the years, organizations with the most successful transformations are the ones that start their data strategy not by filling gaps, but rather by defining the goals that drive where they want to go. With this approach organizations have been able to more effectively get the buy-in they need, design the learning ecosystem they want, and build the roadmap to move them forward. It is from these experiences that we have captured time tested best practices in data strategy development in this Data Strategy Workbook. This workbook will help you outline and define the important elements of your data strategy through four stages Preparation, Evaluation, Evidence, and Presentation providing you and your team with a clear foundation to build your learning data transformation roadmap. By using this workbook to guide a conversation with a small group of creative team members, you will be able to: Define the status and accessibility of your current learning data. Audit and define the assets of your current ecosystem. Begin to scope your xapi pilot project to build your ecosystem of the future! We know you ll find this workbook a helpful resource as you work to move your learning ecosystem forward. There are so many opportunities for developing innovative and transformative experiences for your employees today, but they all must start with a solid data foundation. Good luck on taking your first steps! 2 Data Strategy Workbook
Preparation When it comes to data strategy, the first thing to do is build a solid understanding of what you already have. As you answer the following questions, keep the perspective of your learners themselves in mind, think about how they interact with technologies, how they learn, and what they value. 1. How many learners do you currently have in your organization? How are those learners grouped or divided? 2. What are the current goals for your L&D department? How will you measure success for each goal? Examples could be: Goals Provide the most effective and modern learning opportunities to employees at my organization. Increase learning & develop engagement within my organization. Improve role readiness and performance for new managers in my organization. Success Metrics Measure and optimize platform adoption of learning platforms so that the adoption rate for each platform is >80%. Every employee engages in 5 hours of learning per month. Ensure that all new managers have achieved 100% compliance of Manager Training within 90 days of promotion to management. 3. What aspects of your L&D program do you have great insight into? What aspects do you have very little insight into? What aspects would you like more insight or increased transparency into? Data Strategy Workbook 3
4. Keeping in mind the different ways that formal and informal learning, digital and in-person learning, and ongoing activity happen in your organization, define what does your current learning ecosystem looks like? What learning platforms and sources are included in your learning ecosystem? What reports do you currently utilize to evaluate learning in your organization? How frequently do you evaluate learning in your organization? Do you have insight daily, monthly, or quarterly? Do you know which learning platforms and sources are most utilized by your learners? If so, what are they? Why? Evaluation Now that you know what you have, transition to thinking about how you evaluate the quality, usefulness, and impact of those investments. Using the example chart below as a guide, outline what questions and metrics you would like to measure to help understand and monitor learning activity in your organization. Keep in mind that these do not need to be directly tied to organizational goals at this stage, but they can be if you would like to consider that perspective as well. In the What do we want to know? column on the left, list the knowledge or metrics you would like to know about the learner experience in your organization. Under What do we need to measure this? in the right column, list the activities, events, or data points that would need to be captured in order to answer the question in the left column. It s always O.K. to list I don t know or We still need to figure it out! 4 Data Strategy Workbook
What do we want to know? Course completion rates Platform adoption rates Most and least popular courses Time spent in training Most and least engaged learners Course quality relation to performance impact What do we need to be able to measure this? Course registration, course completion Platform login, platform activity Course registration, post-course rating by participants Learning activity, duration data Learning activity, duration data Attendance data, instructor feedback, impact on performance Evidence Sometimes we know very clearly what we want to know, what we think we know, and what we know that we don t know. The harder part is to understand what data actually provides the evidence for these things that we as learning designers and managers know qualitatively. At this point, use the following questions to help identify what data you already have access to, what data you are missing, and what data matters the most. 1. Is it important to you that you can measure individual learning activity? If so, how do you capture identity currently for both digital and in-person training? Examples: Single Sign On (SSO), corporate email address, Employee ID, registration sheet, etc. 2. For in-person training, is attendance, score or any data recorded digitally either during or after the training? Does that information live in a database or data warehouse? Data Strategy Workbook 5
3. Does your organization currently utilize a competency framework or skills matrix to guide learning content creation and/or measure learner progress toward competency or skill mastery? 4. If you are able to obtain data from your current platforms, answer the following questions for each set of data that you are able to obtain: What platform did this data come from? How did I obtain this data? What pieces of information are in the data? I.e. name, email, duration, score, etc. What are some activity types or actions you see in the data? I.e. completions, clicks, starting a course Do you see any meaningful patterns? I.e. A learner jumps to module 2 before completing quiz 1 Presentation Now we ve reached the fun part! Know that we ve taking into account what data we have and what data is most important, we get to think about how we want to present this data to our stakeholders so that they are able to access and use the data this data to transform our organization! 1. Within your organization, who would have access to learning analytics? Program admins (can see all data)? Executives (can see all data)? 6 Data Strategy Workbook
Team leaders / Managers (can see data scoped to their team)? Individuals (can see only their own data)? 2. How would you want your stakeholders to see and review these learning analytics? Examples: real-time and interactive data dashboards, scheduled reports, BI tool such as Tableau, etc. 3. How would you want your stakeholders to use and apply these learning analytics? 4. In an ideal ecosystem, where would you and your stakeholders access these learning analytics? 5. Do you currently have any business intelligence tools or workflows that this data would need to fit into or be built on? Time to Make It Real What a conversation! What a journey! So many good ideas! Now that you ve completed the workbook, you should have a great idea of the data reporting your organization needs to assess and optimize your learning and development programs. You should also have a clear map of your existing data assets and how they can fit into your learning analytics strategy. Your last step in this guide is to create a list of action items as a group to ensure that this conversation doesn t stop here. Your list might include things like: Explore some Case Studies: Linking Performance and Learning Analytics Deep Insights in TD Magazine Modern Learning Ecosystem Design with xapi Yet Analytics Case Studies Connect with your BI team to understand what their workflow is like Meet with your IT team to learn how data access permissions and authentication from different tools in your learning ecosystem is decided Schedule a review of the conclusions you ve made at this point with Data Strategy Workbook 7
other stakeholders or team members that weren t involved with this process to get their input Meet again as a group in two days to share reflections on the process and add in any aspects or considerations that were missed in the initial workbook session We hope you found this a helpful guide and that you ll add us to your action items list. We d love for you to reach out to the Yet Analytics team to schedule an informal conversation to discuss your Data Strategy Workbook conclusions. We will be happy to get you pointed in the right direction for next steps on your xapi journey! 8 Data Strategy Workbook
About Yet Analytics Bringing new technologies to market in the human capital space, Yet Analytics builds products that revolutionize learning and talent development. Yet s suite of technologies includes the world s most visual learning record store, used by organizations to measure the health of their learning and development initiatives. About the Yet Analytics xapi LRS The Yet Analytics xapi LRS is the world s most visual learning record store. Collect learning records from across your learning ecosystem with the Yet xapi LRS. Use the LRS analytics dashboard to measure learning activity, resource use, and engagement. See the impact of learning investment, evaluate the effectiveness of learning resources, and define your organization s experience graph with the Yet xapi Learning Record Store. Take a Tour of the #1 Ranked Yet xapi Learning Record Store + Analytics See why Yet s xapi LRS is the world s most visual Learning Record Store. Yet collects and visualizes data from the experience graph to help you find patterns and insights in your people data: yetanalytics.com/demo. Work with Yet s Learning Analytics Experts to Develop Your Learning Ecosystem From xapi workshops and strategy development to data integration and IT deployment, the Yet Analytics team can help accelerate your learning analytics initiatives. Reach out to our analyst team to find out if strategic consulting is right for you: hello@yetanalytics.com. Data Strategy Workbook 9
Exeperience intelligence in human capital analytics. yetanalytics.com hello@yetanalytics.com 410.256.3673