All of a sudden, continuing education providers are swimming in data.
This is a good problem. Not five years ago, many CE educators lacked the technology and institutional processes to routinely collect data about their learning programs. Leadership from professional societies, funders, and accreditors has helped change that, as has the adoption of learning technology designed for CE (such as CourseStage LMS, for which I serve as product owner). Now, many continuing education providers are actually able to administer an evaluation – be it for satisfaction, knowledge, skill, or even performance – and actually get a detailed report of the results.
But what do you do with all that data? If you’re an active medical society, for example, you could be facilitating hundreds if not thousands of learning activities for tens of thousands of learners. That means, likely, hundreds of thousands of evaluation submissions and millions of individual item responses. To be able to use these results, we need aggregate analysis: a way of compiling the results of the data, crunching it, and coming out with usable metrics that can help us set goals for improvement.
Through our partnership with wonderful, innovative CE providers – including CHEST, NBOME, and ACRP – Web Courseworks has developed a set of tools for doing that: reports that aggregate evaluation results, calculate test reliability, compare pre- and post-test results, perform item analysis across multiple evaluations, aggregate and compare the results of performance assessments against benchmarks, and more. We are currently packaging them into a product called Evalupac. Our vision is to one day provide educators with a graphical, configurable dashboard for tracking outcomes – inspired by what Greg Lasko and his colleagues at CHEST have already developed.
We’ve submitted Evalupac for an industry award; watch a demo video here:
Greg Lasko of CHEST and I will be presenting on CHEST’s innovative use of our outcomes reporting tools at the American Board of Medical Specialties meeting in Chicago on Monday, September 25. Stop by and see us if you are attending!
Also, don’t miss out on our webinar this month, “How to Curate: Putting Curation into Practice”. David Kelly,Executive Vice President & Executive Director of the eLearning Guild, will be presenting about how successful organizations put curation into practice!
