To answer the above questions, you need to evaluate your e-learning. In fact, the reasons go much deeper beyond these simple examples. Even without having external (or budgetary) reasons for evaluation, evaluation opens many options in regard to improvement of the e-learning system. But if evaluation is so damn important, why do almost 50% of companies skip this essential part? Let’s sketch a few of the most common reasons.

First reason: e-learning is not expected to perform

Remember one of our previous blogs, where we spoke about communicating e-learning to people in your organization? Well, here the consequences of not doing it emerge in full color. When the e-learning initiative is not explained, and remains a “foreign body” in the everyday way of doing things, it is seen as something that doesn’t make much sense, but since the management deployed it, “everyone must take a turn” now and then. E-learning is not expected to really accomplish anything, so there is no need to bother evaluating it, just dance through the ritual and everyone will be happy just as well.

Second reason: no one asked for an evaluation

The second reason stems from a deficient strategy definition. In another previous post we spoke about how important it is to have a well thought through strategy, in order not to let anything to chance. Well, evaluation is definitely one of those things that should be planned. A lot of organizations do not implement any evaluation in their training just because nobody (read: the boss) has requested it. Thing is, even if the formal evaluation is not implemented, it doesn’t mean the training is not getting evaluated. It just gets evaluated intuitively, with but a vague picture of how training contributes to organizational goals, and the outcomes of the training program will be in the danger of being twisted, caught up in the budgetary struggles.

Third reason: evaluation is a threat

Third, a very nasty phenomenon is that people often treat evaluation as a direct threat to their job. It is not that surprising, considering that evaluation always have several outcomes, not all of which are positive. Every work has its blame, and there are always imperfections in the outcomes. Who wants to make those visible, right? Aside from the “outcome evaluation” there is another way, which is called “process evaluation”. There the focus shifts from imperfections as such to what can be learned from those to help improve the process (either that of learning or that of work). When faced with a soft, non-punitive version of evaluation, people tend to drop their defenses and help the improvement, realizing that it is not their personae which are being evaluated, but rather the efficiency of their training in the larger organizational context.

Conclusion: making first steps towards a good evaluation

The culprits sketched above already give away what needs to be done to have a good evaluation of your e-learning program. You need to do some internal PR to create a positive culture around e-learning in your organization. There is indeed a lot of explaining to do, so that e-learning is not just a punitive management tool, but a real help for both management and employees. Of course, aside from the explaining the general quality of e-learning must be in order as well. That is where your strategy should kick in, envisioning the results you want to achieve in the long run, and how exactly to benchmark them in the process. All in all, without good evaluation procedures in place it is very difficult to get a working marriage between organizational performance and learning, and thus leverage the true potential of new technology.