329 course completions so far

We have had 329 course completions so far! SkillSoft Liaisons report that everything is going really well. Here's the breakdown:

27 course completions - IT Professional
106 course completions - IT Desktop
196 course completions - Business

There are some folks who have not logged in yet. Now is a great time to remind people about this project. Winter is often the best time to work on these courses.

Since this project is grant funded, there are certain expectations that everyone must meet:

• IT users (Professional and Desktop) must complete at least 6 hours of content. They must complete at least one course, or can complete multiple courses that add up to at least the 6 hours.
• Business users must complete at least 2 courses. It doesn't matter how long the courses are as long as they complete 2.
• To complete a course, they must pass all assessments with an average total score of at least 75%.

New Project Began on September 1

September 1 marked the beginning of our next year of SkillSoft. Here's where we are:

• The FY2008 project ended with over 673 course completions from 233 users. 529 of these were computer courses, the rest were business courses used for the online supervisors curriculum review. 393 different courses were accessed during this past year.
• This new FY2009 project begins with 458 participants (245 business, 179 IT desktop, 34 IT professional). Liaisons are running kickoff sessions and offering blended classroom training using the newly developed course guides.
• Courses are available until August 30, 2009.

Liaison conference calls will be scheduled soon so we can share what we're learning about the rollout including best practices. Meanwhile, here's a quick glimpse of our statistics to date:

Total Course Accesses: 338
Distinct Courses Accessed: 135
Total Users: 185
Total Completions: 93

Summary of Evaluations

Thank you to those who completed course evaluations. Your feedback is crucial for grant reporting and greatly helps to make future procurement decisions. Overall, feedback about the courses was better than expected considering these are basically web tutorials with no instructor feedback (except for the SkillSoft online mentoring available to those taking some of the MS Office courses). Most everybody reported "Agree" or "Strongly Agree" on the questions with very few (as in like 2) reporting "Disagree" or "Strongly Disagree" on anything! Even with our 2 disatisfactions, I can come to no conclusion because other people reported these courses as A OK.

We've had two people report that they took the courses and then did not remember what to do on the job. That's another whole level of evaluation that we have not asked you about and it's where "the rubber hits the road". My response is to please consider doing some kind of work-related project (like volunteer to type the minutes from a meeting using your newly acquired MS Word skills) or you will forget what you have learned. Also, count on forgetting some things, but plan on what you will do when you are asked to remember - like checking the Help menu, referencing a book or using notes. The idea here is that now you should at least feel more comfortable with the topic and can find out what you need to do to get the job done. Please feel free to comment here on any other thoughts or ideas you have about this.

Final Statistics - GREAT JOB!!

We had 529 course completions and if you include those evaluating the Business Courses, the total is 673! Here's what we did:

Summary:
Total Course Accesses: 1223
Distinct Courses Accessed: 393
Total Users: 223
Total Completions: 673
Total Training Time: 86 days, 23:54:49

Breakdowns by Group:
Desktop:
163 seats assigned
133 users logged in
497 completions (that's an average of 3 courses completed per user - wow!)

IT Professional:
75 seats assigned
61 users logged in73 distinct courses used
100 completions (remember most of these courses are longer than Desktop courses)

Business Curriculum ("online supervisors") project where people reviewed courses:
64 seats assigned
55 users logged in 88 distinct courses used
144 completions (lots of curriculum review happened here)

411 course completions and 2 more weeks to go

We've had 411 course completions to date - you're doing great! The project ends August 31, so you have about 2 weeks or so to finish up. Here's what we have:

Desktop:
163 seats assigned
124 users logged in
150 distinct courses used (yup, this many different course titles were accessed)
373 completions (that's an average of 3 courses completed per user - wow!)

IT Professional:
75 seats assigned
52 users logged in
73 distinct courses used
38 completions (so keep going, IT Pros!)

fyi - here's the statistics for the Business Curriculum ("online supervisors") project:
64 seats assigned
64 users logged in
88 distinct courses used
135 completions (the curriculum reviewers worked hard, don't you think?)

The correct completion number to date is 244

So we have 244 IT courses completed so far, which is still very good, but let's keep checking in with those folks who have yet to do at least one course. Here's the breakdown:

IT Professional Seats:
Total Course Accesses: 85
Distinct Courses Accessed: 60
Total Users: 44
Total Completions: 19

IT Desktop Seats:
Total Course Accesses: 422
Distinct Courses Accessed: 111
Total Users: 115
Total Completions: 225

The reports also show me that the course access time for the IT Professional Seats is 0 minutes, which means these folks are not using the courses to access information. Hmmm ... these seats are expensive, so it looks like I need to do a survey and ask what's up.

Your Help with Evaluations

First - 347 courses completed so far!!!! - Oops, that included business skills - Let me look at this again and add another post.

Next - I just tried to run a course evaluation report to gauge participant reactions to the various technology courses they are taking on SkillSoft. There are no evaluations to report! Is it really possible that nobody has completed an evaluation for any course? (Let me know if it’s me!) Can you possibly ask your participants to complete whatever evaluations that they can (no pressure)?

Please see "Evaluation Added" post below for info on how participants can access their evaluations.

154 course completions and it's still cold

It's still cold so now may be a great time to check in with your SkillSoft Technology project participants. Remember that everyone should complete at least one course. I see that some have already completed more! Here's what the stats are saying as of now. Looks like low techs are beating high techs as of now. Remember that you can run activity reports if you want to know who needs encouragement.

SkillSoft End-User seats ("low techs")
168 people registered for a seat
106 people have accessed the SkillPort to use the courses
316 courses accessed
144 course completions

SkillSoft IT Professional seats ("high techs")
74 people registered for a seat
37 people have accessed the SkillPort
67 courses accessed
10 course completions