Foundations: Overview of Reporting Options

Getting meaningful insights about your learning programs is a major reason for using an LMS. That’s why Latitude offers a number of reporting options to help you make all the captured training data work for you to improve and expand learning opportunities for your learners.

Overview of Reporting Options

If you are new to LatitudeLearning LMS or considering our services, it’s important to understand that as your LMS generates and captures important training information for your organization, there are reporting tools available to ensure you can capture and analyze that information to assess and improve your programs. 

Here’s a quick overview of the Reporting options available in the LatitudeLearning LMS.

Classic Reports

Every LMS includes standard reports covering Courses, Users, Accreditations, and Training Progress. Classic Reports are organized into folders under Reports > Classic Reports. These are hard-coded reports that are made visible by user role assignment. While the underlying setup of the report is fixed, most offer filters to control the results delivered and to select the desired output type.

Depending on your organization’s preferences and user role assignments, individuals may see more, fewer, or different reports from those listed for a portal administrator.

Classic Reports can also include custom reports which your organization engages Latitude to create based on specific requirements that may not be possible using any of the existing Classic or Report Writer options.

Unique Facts About Classic Reports

Classic report have key fundamental differences from reports you can write in Report Writer.

  1. If your portal is configured for person-to-person management reporting, Classic Reports are not optimized to scope results through the managerial position hierarchy and will still rely on users’ positional assignments. They do not support reporting by managerial relationships established as Person-to-Person.
  2. Classic reports generate in real time while you wait. You can’t leave the page and come back later to get results. Additionally, customers with large data sets may find reports time-out while calculating in real time.
  3. They are hard-coded for specific LMS roles and can only be modified to change roles by a Latitude developer. 

Report Writer

The Report Writer tool empowers portal administrators to create, organize, share, and schedule custom reports based on a variety of data limited sets called report “entities”. 

These entities focus on specific areas of learning history and system master data, including:

  • Course and Course Summary are based on user transcripts and course goals
  • Accreditation and Accreditation Summary are based on user status related to their certifications and curricula, including those set as goals
  • Course Attributes allows reporting on Course and Course-offering related master data, settings, and configuration
  • User allows reporting on User Account and Profile master data and settings
  • Assessment Attempt provides reporting for Assessment-type courses and the user’s interactions with the tests, such as per question answers and correct/incorrect status.
  • Assessment Attributes allows reports based on the test, objective, and question configuration for an Assessment delivery method course.
  • Organization entity allows reporting on the LMS organizational structure and related master data. 

Data cannot be pulled from multiple entities at the same time. There is little summarization or formatting of results in the report output, making export and further manipulation in Excel or a database application ideal.

Portal Administrators can organize reports into any number of folders that make sense for the organization. Some of Latitude’s current clients use these folders in a multitude of ways, including organizing by the topic or entity of the reports, by departments or roles, or even by specific manager names so that the reports in their folder are set up to find the results only relevant to them.

Unique Facts About Report Writer

Report Writer has key fundamental differences from Classic Reports.

  1. Report configuration and results consider person-to-person management reporting, in addition to standard position-based management reporting.
  2. Report Writer reports generate offline through a processing queue. You can leave the report page, work on other things, and either check back for your results or look in your email for a report success or failure notification. This greatly reduces the chance of timeouts for large data returns – but be aware that there is a 100,000 result limit for Report Writer and beyond it, it may be necessary to filter more tightly and run the report more than once.
  3. These reports can be shared by role as part of the report configuration done by the portal administrator – no by a Latitude developer required. 
  4. Report Writer reports can be scheduled to run automatically and send results to an email list or SFTP server – making it a hands-off task for administrators after all the initial setup.

Tracking Progress Without a Report

The ability to report on employee progress isn’t restricted to traditional reporting. The My Team manager dashboard is a great way to stay on top of employee training progress at a glance.

The My Team page is a one-stop shop where managers can:

  • View employee profile data
  • View the student’s Goals, Courses to Complete, and Training History pages
  • Download completion certificates from employee training history
  • View accreditation and course goal progress and easily visualize past due goals
  • View Employee Skills Profile status associated with curriculum-type accreditations
  • Review and approve any items pending approval, such as course enrollment requests and self-study manager-verified completion requests.

The filtered employee view from the My Team – People tab is also available to download to Excel, CSV, or PDF files.