How Online Learning Platforms Track Learners?

Tracking a learner’s activity on online learning platforms can be very hectic. Many e-learning platforms use effective and real-time tracking systems to keep an eye on learners’ progress.

Many of these platforms depend on various third-party tools to get the overall idea of learners’ growth and effectiveness—various e-learning platforms like Coursera, edX, Pluralsight, and Udacity use many techniques to track their learners. 

Are you wondering how these Online Learning Platforms track Learners? Well, this article has the answer.

After conducting research on the e-learning tracking system, I have figured out the ways that would work excellently to track your learners. So in this article, I am covering a complete overview of what is an eLearning tracker, how online learning platforms track learners, and some of the features of this tracking system.

Let’s get into it!

What is an eLearning Tracker?

The eLearning tracker is a set of tools that manage your eLearning platform and track all the activities of the learners.

Using the eLearning tracker gives you the ability to monitor the behavior of your student. 

You can track every single activity of the learner, like when they logged in, when they logged out, how much time they spent on which course, and how much time they took to complete the course. 

With these eLearning Tracking systems, you can you also keep an eye on the productivity of the whole day. Also, attendance monitoring helps to get the most out of their studies. 

Tracking Techniques In eLearning

Here is a few techniques of eLearning there.

LMS Tracking:

LMS, i.e., Learning Management System, is a widely used system by online eLearning platforms. It is the most accessible system to make an eLearning teaching system.

It is an easy-to-use technique that is designed to end to end so that educators can track it through a simple dashboard and interface.

LMS Tracking mainly focuses on reporting, tracking, and delivering online courses through its dashboard services. Also, with the LMS tools, Online learning platforms track the learner’s scores, sessions they are currently working on, and the deadline of the student’s course.

It also gives an overview of the assignments that are due, missing assignments, and the scores of each student.

Manual Tracking: 

Online learning platforms use the manual tracking system in order to get exemplary data.

Manual Tracking provides minimal information like primary data about their activities and courses, information about the learners, and data on course completion. 

This includes the manual form filling and paperwork about the course learners are taking and courses that are completed. 

This might be the easiest way to track the learners, but many loopholes exist in maintaining the data. 

Automatic Tracking:

Automatic tracking is also an effective tool for tracking learners. The automatic tracking includes web server tracking that automatically collects the data of the courses learners are taking. 

It also keeps an eye on each time learners take the course. Moreover, it analyzes the data of learner behavior, like time taken to complete the course, time of login and log out, and how students are using the course. 

Thus this data helps in analyzing the overall trends to plan the strategies and calculate the return on investment. 

The general statistics by the automatic tracking includes how many times user enroll in the course, how many times users are visiting the dashboards, and also the website page views by the visitors.

Third Party Cookies:

Third-party cookies also work best to track the activities of learners. These third-party cookies keep track of the user’s domain.

It is just like if the user visits a website, then that website might set a cookie. When that user visits to another website, the website he used can monitor the activity of the user for another website. 

Clicking Method:

This tracking system includes monitoring each and every page on the eLearning dashboard. It collects the information of each page on which the user is performing the activities. 

It gives you reports on insights about the per click by the learner, how much time each learner stayed on the specific page, and the highest visiting times. 

This clicking tracking system performs tracking page views only. As such, it is an excellent method to track learner involvement. 

Database Tracking

The database tracking technique works on the basic data of the learners, like their names and starting time of the course. 

The webpage records the information about each activity of the user and shares it with the eLearning platforms. After getting this information, eLearning platforms create a report that includes each and every detail of the student or learner and the browsing activity of the user. 

Custom Tracking

Some of the eLearning platforms go for custom tracking systems. They build their own custom tracking that helps them get the data so quickly and efficiently.

This system might consume time to build the custom system, but it helps to analyze the data more perfectly and neatly. 

Related Read:

How to Learn Accents
How Long Does It Take to Learn Sign Language
How Long Does It Take to Learn a Guitar
How to Learn Animation Online

My Take on Tracking Online Learners

You can track the visits to your eLearning courses and the general behavior of your learners by utilizing these efficient tracking strategies. 

This gives you a chance to tailor the eLearning experience for your target audience, guarantee that compliance requirements are satisfied, and increase the return on investment for your eLearning course.

The kind of e-learning activity you want to track will typically dictate the best tracking method for your needs.

You’ll need a means of recording course completions to identify the students who completed the course. When only a small learner group on the honour system has to provide information, manual tracking is an alternative. 

If not, you should probably consider adopting an LMS to keep track of the online courses.

Web server tracking will probably provide you with what you need for monitoring course consumption activities without regard for course completion.

Finally, you can look into custom tracking solutions if you have access to a technical specialist and none of the other tracking techniques work for you.