The purpose of a learning management system is to not only deliver course content, but also to report on user activity.

But what are the reports that actually matter?

The short answer is that “it depends”. Specifically, it depends on what your organization must know with regards to the users and their course interactions.

I have seen quite a few learning management systems and all of them offer some degree of reporting. At a very minimum you should be capturing the following metrics:

• Enrollment – pretty self-explanatory but worth mentioning. You need to see who is in what course.
• Status – Have users started the course yet, is it in progress, or completed?
• In Progress Breakdown – If a user is in progress then that could mean a lot of different things. There is a big difference between completing 10% and completing 90%.
• Current Location – Similar to the above except this item tells you exactly where in teh course (i.e. which lesson) the learner is currently on.
• Time Spent in Course – Did someone complete the course in 10 minutes? If so, you know that they didn’t really go through all of the content. Your LMS should tell you this.
• Quiz Performance – If your courses have quizzes then you need to know if they completed the quiz and their score.
• Individual Quiz Answers – It is nice to know a quiz passing versus failing rate, but that only tells part of the story. Your LMS should also report on individual answers to question so that you can see if there are any patterns to those who fail.
• Last Login – This is a bit of a “nice to have” but in some cases you may want to know the last time a user logged into your LMS to take course content. If it has been a long time then you can follow-up accordingly.

There may be more metrics that you want to capture as well so it is imperative that you have a LMS that can have their reporting easily extended.

By way of example, LearnDash can cover all of the above but also has the ability for reports to be customized via custom development or by using a plugin such as:

1. User Insights for LearnDash
2. LearnDash User Results
3. Front-End Reporting & Analysis

In the end we all need different things out of our LMS and there isn’t one out there that can satisfy every single requirement.

However, there are options out there that allow you to create custom elements if necessary. These are the solutions you should be seriously considering as they will give you the most flexibility for your learning program.