Skilljar - Learner Progress Tracking
- Matthew Harrington
Analytics
Summary & Lessons Learned from Skilljar
Skilljar, like Canvas, is an example of how a platform focused entirely on a specific use case can tailor its tools to one single opinionated pattern of use, which in turn is worth considering from the perspective of “what do different specific use-cases need?”
In Skilljar’s case, this means that they had a need for access to analytics and performance data to be available at a different level of access to modifying course content.
Skilljar strips back everything to what is relevant to their use case, and their sidebar provides context to what has and hasn’t been completed. What’s also relevant is that having a flatter navigational structure, tracking of completion is purely limited to lessons. Sections organise lessons, but have no concept of completion - they simply exist, and the lessons within them are completed.
Having different optional completion states makes it clear to admins how a lesson will be marked complete, but not to learners. This is a problem we also have (except we have no options for different completion models), and should be improved given “why is this not complete” is such a common question from learners.
Skilljar’s way of optionally tracking completion across centralised assets is extremely powerful and has potential for our revamped content library system. Not having to repeat content that you have already mastered is fundamental to competency-based education and improves the learner experience as a whole.
Administrator Learner Progress Tracking
Skilljar’s fairly comprehensive admin reporting is covered in the platform-level reporting research, but I’ll recap here the parts of it that are relevant to progress.
In the Skilljar Admin Learner report, you can see what % of the course a learner has completed, as well as how long it has taken to get them to that point:
Alongside this are dates for their registration and completion, and activity, with when they were last active.
This data does not deliver any interpretation, but simply presents the raw data - if you wanted to see how far learners got on average before dropping out, you’d need to process the downloaded CSV to extract that insight, despite the fact that all the data you’d need to learn that is actually available.
Within an individual learner, you can see additional data along these lines:
Assets themselves track completion, meaning that if a course asset is used on multiple courses, you can enable cross-course completion of those assets. This means that learners are not forced to complete the same content multiple times.
Course Staff Learner Progress Tracking
Skilljar’s model is built around self-paced customer training, which means that staff do not typically manage courses after they are built. This means that unless they are given specific access to the admin dashboard, they do not actually gain access to reporting for learners in the course.
Learner Progress Tracking
Learners track their progress via the course navigation and outline. When a learner satisfies the completion criteria for the piece of content, such as loading a page of HTML, loading a video, completing a video (it’s an optional setting on each video whether the entire video has to be watched to be marked as complete), or completing a quiz, the lesson is checked off on the list:
There is no progress page, nor is there a grade tracking page. Each quiz is marked complete when passed, and course completion is fully dependent on having completed each non-optional lesson (with optional lessons indicated by the dashed circle instead of the whole circle).