Have you been successful measuring your organization's return on investment after implementing an e-learning program? What percentage of staff members completed the inital session?

Nope. Never seen a successful post-evaluation that was capable of accurately pinpointing ROI. Evaluations that occur *after* the fact (e.g., after someone has attended an event or read a module or done some learning activity) are measuring performance which is a factor primarily of the individual and his/her manager, team and work environment. Has very little to do with the training itself, and even if training helped at all, it's nearly impossible to say "this person is doing X, Y and Z better because of this training." It's best to ensure that the connections between learning, performance and business goals are clear before any training is designed.

People who completed the sessions were forced to do so.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: LoveLearning,

% of completion or numbers of seats- always. This for my organization is easy. But ROI is, for us, "what did it do to the bottom line relative to what it cost to build".

This really demands some up front agreement on what variables will be considered or excluded (i.e. if RE sales are dropping in the economy, how does that impact figure into our sales results).

Upfront agreements and measured determined, we can determine an "agreed ROI", but it is a negotiated understanding, and not a 100% firm number (which I am uncertain we can ever really get to).

Any further questions or for examples, feel free to contact me.

My company has a push technology (called Q) that automatically delivers eLearning "sound bites" on a daily or weekly schedule directly to the user's desktop - then measures user participation, retention and misalignment problems for managers. A typical event involves delivering dozens of 5 minute interventions over a multi-week/multi-month timeframe. Because our interventions are short, relevant and trackable - user participation and completion averages in the mid to high 90 percentile on every project.

In most cases, it is impossible to point directly to a quantitative ROI, as there are always a dozen other operational "levers" that were pushed by the company during that timeframe - not to mention external economic factors. In this case, customers have pushed out blind surveys to the sales force and asked them to rate if and how the reinforcement interventions helped improve their effectiveness.

We have had a few projects where the customer pointed to specific quantitative ROI - either by having GROUP A go through the traditional event without continuous reinforcement and GROUP B going through the event with continuous reinforcement. In those cases, the differences were quite compelling. Most customers do not want to do this, as it is counterproductive to organizational objectives to restrict reinforcement of a relevant initiative - as the value proposition is fairly intuitive.

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