At my company, we don't often evaluate return on investment with eLearning. Does anyone have experience measuring return on investment or know of best practices?

In my experience, measuring ROI of eLearning is the same as any other learning: What is the cost? What is the return?

For cost:
What is the time investment from users vs. their own salary costs? With an LMS and HR data, this should be calculable
What is cost to develop and run the system?
What is the cost per module following on the system? (if your organisation asks learners / business units to pay)

For return:
What do learners get out of usage?
What did they learn (post-learning competence test)?
Happy sheets
What is the impact on the organisation? (In my current contact centre organisation, this means measuring impact on average handling time, first call resolutions...). You could measure attrition, etc...

Hope this helps!

Everything you put in training should always be considered as an "investment". Now, was that investment profitable? For that you would have to compare metrics of all kinds prior, during and after the implementation. If you follow Kirkpatrick's model you can also gauge participant reaction and adaptation to the desired behavior.


There are many ways to look at this in ROI:

1)ROI = (Benefits/Costs) x (100).


2)ROI = ((Benefits - Costs)/Costs) x (100).

3)There’s also a forecasted calculation:
ROI = ((Benefits - Costs)/Costs) x (100)
x (%A) x (%P).
Where %A is the percentage of learners who are
expected to use the training and %P is the percentage
of employees who received the training (Murray and
Efendioglu, 2007, pp. 374–
375; Phillips, Pulliam,
& Wurtz, 1998).

Any and all things you do should *begin* with a connection to the business goals. If you don't have a way to show a path from the get-go of how the learning/training/etc. you're creating and implemented will impact the bottom line, why did you do it in the first place? Trying to measure ROI after the fact is like closing the barn door after the horses have already escaped.