A “dashboard” is an interface which displays different metrics and key performance indicators to users. In online learning, a learner dashboard helps learners track progress towards different milestones and goals like course completion, lesson completion, badge awards, CEUs, and more.
Typically, the dashboard is the first page displayed when a learner logs into their learning experience. By giving learners a holistic view of their online learning experience and learning road map, your organization can expect to see boosts in engagement, retention, and an increase in positive feedback. Plus, putting things such as announcements, to-dos, courses in progress, and discussions on a dashboard keeps important things top-of-mind and improves response time.
Benefits of Well-curated Learner Dashboards
Customizable dashboards help your organization and course administrators showcase important information—something that changes as time passes. If you haven’t given much thought to online learning dashboards before, now is the time. Here are more reasons why:
- Learners get insights: Learners want to know about their progress—from start, to finish, and everywhere in between—to feel in control of their learning experience. By giving learners access to a dashboard, you’re empowering them to take a “data-driven” approach to their learning and ensuring that no announcement goes unnoticed.
- Admins can manage: Course administrators are in charge of customizing the learner dashboard. This customization, again, helps get important information right in front of learners and allows them to align with the organization’s current marketing efforts. From their dashboard view, admins can see enrollment metrics, course progression metrics, authoring information, settings, student messages, and more. This helps them better manage their courses and improve the learning experience.
- Learners get motivated: Displaying badges and awards on the learner dashboard will remind learners about their accomplishments, and hopefully empowere them to engage more with your learning experience.
- Helps boost interaction: Leaderboards help foster healthy competition and typically motivate learners to engage with one another. Maybe some learners will source their peers for study help, or simply work harder to earn as many points, badges, star, etc., as their peers.
Customizing Dashboards to Fit Your Needs
At Thought Industries, we enable organizations to create customizable learner dashboards in order to better engage and retain learners. Here are some features and widgets available in order to deliver the experience your learners expect:
- Stat widgets: Right at the top of your learner dashboard, let learners know how many courses are available to take, how many they have started, how many are completed, the number of certifications they have achieved, and more. Include stats that are important to your learners, and customize those stats across different learning environments or learner types.
- News and announcement widgets: New course? New product? Other updates to share with your learners? Add and remove news and announcements from the learner dashboard.
- Quick access widgets: Give learners quick access to which courses are in progress or completed. Allow learners to then navigate to those different courses right from their dashboard.
- Catalog widgets: Encourage learners to purchase or enroll in more of your online courses by implementing a widget that displays your entire catalog of offerings. You can also display products that might complement or aid to your learners’ experience.
- Banner promotions: Use your dashboard to advertise products, upcoming courses, or course sponsors with banner ads.
- Featured content carousel: Have certain courses or products you want to highlight? Get them right in front of your learners with featured content carousels. By showcasing this featured content, learners are more likely to convert.
- Link list: Want to send learners to outside resources or content? Include a link list to encourage learners to dig deeper into learner or maybe to visit your site and explore your organization’s other offerings.
Using online learning technology to create customized learner dashboards will help your organization scale learning faster. Customize dashboards across different learning experiences and learner types to satisfy learners and get the response you are looking for.
