To thrive within the market of online learning, creating an online course is just a start. So many tools are available to help you make one. In fact, you can use an AI course creator like CourseAI to help you with anything from design to content – it’s so much easier now.
But then again, if your aim is to generate sustainable passive income, measuring your success is a crucial part of the process.
Learning your KPIs and other benchmarks will let you understand your audience and maximize your course’s impact.
In this post, we will go through the how-to’s for tracking and measuring the success of your online course.
Key Metrics for Measuring Success
As far as defining if you have a thriving online course, there are several elements to understand. From profits to engagement, we will dive into all measurable components of your product.
Engagement
There are two key metrics you should look for when measuring engagement: completion rate and time spent. The completion rate signifies that your course is highly engaging and provides value to your customers.
If you have more courses available (within the same niche), the best way to get your benchmark is to get the average from all of your courses.
Do the same on time spent. Tracking the average time students spend on a single module translates into the pacing and difficulty of your module. If you’ve seen an outlier, then revisit the module and make the necessary adjustments.
Learning Assessments
Believe it or not, this is what most online courses don’t have. They just sell and leave the students off. Don’t be like them; quizzes can also be created using an online course creator like CourseAI.
What you get from having an assessment score is a quantitative measure of knowledge acquisition. It’s a solid indicator of the effectiveness of your material. If you’re getting a consistently low pass rate, you’ll be able to identify any areas where your students are struggling.
Customer Satisfaction
This is the same as engagement. However, we specifically separated this section so we can go into detail.
Think of CSAT as a survey on whether your student was satisfied with your course and whether they recommend it to their friends. This type of KPI is usually being used on products and services, but since you are selling a product/service, it applies to you too.
There are 3 steps to collate the data you need:
- Define your questions: These questions should be clear and answerable by a rating of 1-5. You can start with: “On a scale of 1 (very dissatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied), how satisfied are you with this online course?”
- Collect your responses: Incorporate these CSAT questions as part of the student survey forms you give out at the end of the course.
- Calculate your CSAT score: Know the number of students who gave you positive feedback, divide it by the total number of respondents, and multiply by 100. There’s no universal standard score, but it’s a starting point for understanding your students’ overall perception and identifying areas for improvement.
Pro tip: You can use an AI course creator like CourseAI to generate questions for your CSAT survey, too.
Profitability
Calculating your profit is a very straightforward process. All you need to do is subtract all the expenses from the total revenue from your sales. However, because of the complexity of online courses, it’s better to use a different formula, such as The Simplified Profit Margin This is calculated as follows:
(Revenue – Course Creation Costs) / Revenue x 100%
A higher percentage means an effective and successful output. But the main reason why you have to do this instead of the traditional way is that you can also use this to compare the relative profitability of your other online course.
You may have noticed the trend, but what we’ve been doing is getting all of the numbers from all your courses and checking the average so you can set your benchmark.
Tracking Your Success
Yes, tracking is different from measuring. Tracking is keeping records of what you’ve measured with the goal of learning patterns and gaining a consistent flow of insights from your students and overall course performance.
The easiest way to track your success is via analytics. Most LMS platforms offer built-in features to track various aspects of student engagement and course performance. Use these features to check all that we’ve mentioned above.
Bottom Line
If you’re planning to create more than one course, then knowing if your material is effective is very important.
Understanding where you need to improve and where you excel is an amazing tool to have. You’ll be able to make adjustments along the way and you can apply them to your next online courses.
This will help you get better with your passion and make a consistent income stream if done right.