BlogLearning & Development

9 Types of LMS Reports You Need to Generate

Emily Mason
Writer, Learning and Development
Learning & Development
October 3, 2023

LMS reports provide insights into learner progress, course effectiveness, engagement levels, and help in making data-driven training decisions.

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You’ve been tasked with tracking the performance of your new LMS, or with optimizing how your organization uses the current one. Where do you start? What LMS reports should you generate to accurately assess learner progress and the quality of your training materials?

One benefit of an LMS is that it collects plenty of raw data, but that data needs to be analyzed in order to inform your decision-making. That’s where reporting features shine.

An LMS report is the systematic way to organize and view data on user engagement, assessments, and more. The right LMS provides a wide variety of reports to pinpoint the information you need, in a few easy clicks. 

This article shares the top learning and development metrics you should track – and the insight you can gain from them! 

One learning platform, and endless reports you can generate! Ok, maybe not endless, but if the data has been gathered, there’s a report you can run! 

Here are some of the most helpful LMS reports to support and improve your workplace training:

1. User engagement 

This report gives you a detailed breakdown of each active user and their activity within the learning management system.

Shows details like: 

  • Learning Tracks started & completed
  • Likes, shares, and comments on content
  • Workshops attended
  • Pending and completed assignments 

Why it matters: 

This is a particularly great report to run as you first go live and learners start engaging with training. You get a snapshot of activity and engagement that helps you gauge reception and how employees are incorporating learning into their weekly workflows.

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2. Content engagement 

A content engagement report gives a detailed breakdown of any or all of the content in your LMS instance. This report will show all the content for your organization in the LMS, and the engagement it has received in the time frame specified.

Shows details like: 

  • Total views, likes, comments, shares for a piece of content
  • Average rating 
  • Date last updated
  • Whether or not that content is part of a learning track 

Why it matters: 

This report will help you assess how well certain content is performing, and track learner response and feedback. You’ll immediately be able to see if a certain course is being completely ignored (could be a sign that it’s outdated, clunky, or irrelevant!) or if it’s getting great interaction and attention.

3. Workshop Engagement 

LMS platforms have been an ideal match to host and manage webinars and deliver eLearning content to more and more learners. But managing these workshops can be a burden on your admins!

A workshop engagement report is an effective way of measuring the overall engagement of all in-person and virtual sessions that are being facilitated in the LMS.

Shows details like: 

  • Whether or not that workshop registration is active 
  • How many seats are enabled
  • Number of registrations (and if a waitlist is enabled) 

Why it matters:

This report helps you to measure effectiveness and ROI on workshops, and gain a snapshot of which workshops are in high-demand. With this report, you can better plan and prepare for future workshops. 

4. Assignment Summary Report 

This report breaks down all the assignments in your LMS based on the report parameters you choose. 

Shows details like: 

  • Assigner details 
  • Assignment status 

Why it matters: 

This feature and report saves a significant amount of time for your admins. Viewing all assignments at a glance helps them to cross-check the workload for each employee. Assignments can be automated in an LMS like Continu, so this feature gives an easy way to check what content each learner has in their queue to complete. 

5. Manager Summary Report 

Modern teams are dealing with frequent change and rapid expansion. It’s so important to stay organized and easily see where your employees are with their training progress. A manager summary report gives a breakdown of all managers and their direct reports based on the parameters you choose, to provide better support for each individual user.

Shows details like: 

  • Number of learners who report to that manager 
  • The number of open and completed assignments for their direct reports 
  • The number of learning tracks that have been started and completed by their direct reports 

Why it matters: 

The manager summary report gives a snapshot of user activity for each manager’s team. Lots of sectors have critical compliance training and strict deadlines, so delegation helps you ensure that teams are achieving deadlines and getting extra support when they need it. 

6. Learning Track Status Report

Learning tracks are a key LMS feature – they are sequences of content you put together for your learners, to accomplish objectives like onboarding new hires

The learning track status report shows critical metrics for single learning tracks, across parameters you choose, like a certain time frame. 

Shows details like: 

  • Track Status: Incomplete or completed.
  • Track Completed Date: Date the learning track was completed by the learner.
  • Track Progress: Represented as a number, the completion percentage of the track.

Why it matters: 

This report is helpful to get an idea of how learners are progressing through a specific learning track. Analyzing this report helps you to see if a high number of employees are struggling with the track, and if you need to shorten, lengthen, or otherwise modify the content for better outcomes! 

7. Assessment Status Report 

This report provides a summary of an LMS assessment taken by learners. 

Shows details like: 

  • It can be filtered by date, specific assessment, and learners. 
  • A snapshot of each learner's passes, fails, and the number of attempts for each assessment.

Why it matters: 

This report helps you evaluate whether a certain assessment is doing its job to accurately measure learner progress. It also makes it simple to assess each learner: how are they doing with assessments, does it seem like they are staying focused during training time, or do they need extra support? 

8. SCORM Status Report 

The SCORM status report is an easy way to view learners and their progress through the SCORM courses in your LMS instance.

Shows details like: 

  • SCORM Title
  • SCORM Status: These values will vary & are usually shown as either Incomplete/Complete or Passed/Failed
  • SCORM Completed Date: Date the course was completed by the learner.

Why it matters: 

SCORM content is a staple of workplace training, and it’s important to keep track of how learners are interacting with your SCORM courses. Make informed decisions and improve your content offerings by keeping track of learner progress. 

9. Leaderboards

Leaderboard reports display a list of your learners and their rankings across multiple categories. These reports help you to recognize and celebrate the team members who are going the extra mile with their training. 

Shows details like:

  • Number of courses completed

Why it matters: 

Some gamification and friendly competition are welcome additions to workplace training. Leaderboard reports benefit both learners and administrators by showing top learners, making it easier to celebrate and reward their success! 

Why is LMS reporting important? 

LMS reports will quickly become a superhero feature for your admins! A better grasp on your training strategy and performance will translate into more confidence and clarity as you train your teams. 

Here are 5 simple (but powerful) reasons to pay attention to LMS reports: 

1. Shows if your training is working

LMS reports show the effectiveness of your training across multiple dimensions. Without the data and the structure of an LMS, you’re left wondering if your materials are doing the job and making an impact. 

But with LMS data, you can see assessment scores, course completion rates, and learner engagement scores. All of these taken together give you an accurate picture of whether your L&D strategy is effective

2. Helps you track learner progress

Whether your organization has 50 or 500 employees, keeping track of incomplete, overdue, and upcoming training for each learner gets complicated! LMS reports save a lot of time for admins and help you see specific learner progress. 

3. Assess content and training materials 

LMS reports give you insight into the effectiveness of your content. This can be as simple as looking at user ratings of each course. You can also generate reports on where your learners drop off during a learning track or how long it took to complete to pinpoint areas of difficulty and go back to the drawing board for improvements. 

4. Easily shared with stakeholders 

LMS reports make it simple to share your employee training success with other stakeholders in the organization. Calculate ROI and employee training results with concrete data, organized in minutes for easy comprehension. 

5. Prevents compliance breaches 

This is a deeper layer of the benefit of tracking employee progress. Clear metrics on learner progress help you to maintain compliance (and prove it when necessary). And if needed, you’ll be able to pinpoint where an employee may have missed or skipped important training, and address that in a timely manner before any possible breach of conduct or compliance. 

Make the most of your LMS reports  

A good LMS organizes all your data into useful reports, but it’s up to your team to act on the insights you gain. 

  • Schedule your LMS reporting tool to automatically generate and send reports for the areas you regularly check. This saves you time each month and ensures you’re always working from updated figures. 
  • Share reports with stakeholders and amongst your team to celebrate successes and raise awareness about areas to improve. A good LMS creates reports that can be exported in multiple formats and are easy-to-read and interpret. 
  • Synthesize the data from all these reports to calculate your training ROI. Most of the 9 reports from above contain necessary data to calculate training ROI, where you compare the cost of your training against impact on business goals (and hopefully see a score over 100%!). 

At Continu, we’re fanatical about organization and data! 

Continu reporting tools are powerful and seamlessly built into our modern learning platform to give you confidence that your training is working. All of the reports in this list can be generated and exported in just a few clicks, giving you all the data you need to make informed decisions about your training strategy. 

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About the Author
Emily Mason is the Content Writer at Continu.
Emily Mason
Writer, Learning and Development

Emily is a copywriter and content marketer specializing in Learning and Development. Emily is currently based in West Michigan. She loves words, coffee, and walking by the lake.