Collecting and Reporting Stats for Learn WordPress Discussion Groups

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In the Americas friendly Community Team meeting today, a suggestion was made by @andreamiddleton:

it would be cool to see this level of reporting for workshops/discussion groups on Learn

This was inspired by the “transparency and clarity” of @jillbinder‘s reports on the Diversity Speakers Workshops.

Based on the conversation that continued, it seems the following are statistics that could be collected and reported upon:
* registrations: the number of people that sign-up to attend a discussion group
* attendees: the number of people that show-up to a discussion group

Some suggestions on other metrics to collect:
* date and time of a discussion group
* which workshop is being discussed

Are there additional metrics that we should collect?
Where should these metrics be reported?

#learn-wordpress

#stats, #workshops

Ryan Marks 2:51 am on August 21, 2020

Where should these metrics be reported?

What do you all think about showing the total number of attendees that have participated in a discussion group as a value on the workshop page? This would be similar to the number of times a theme or pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party is used in an installation of WordPress.
jillbinder 3:06 am on August 21, 2020

In this #community-team chat, we were talking a bit as well about how some of these metrics were collected.

@camikaos: “Show ups are counted manually and reported in the post discussion group survey by the discussion lead”

@jillbinder: “Just a note: From experience, if you are tracking who attended, doing this manually is a pain on Zoom. The participant order changes so for larger groups, it is hard to track who is coming in and out. If these discussions are happening on zoom, if you set it to require Zoom registration to attend, then Zoom will create an attendance sheet for you. I have started doing this for all of my events where I need to know who attended.”

Also to add, I get this level of detail in my reports by requiring information on sign-up, and then cross-referencing with the Zoom list of who attended as well as from a post-workshop questionnaire.
- jillbinder 3:09 am on August 21, 2020
  
  I will add also that if you are only collecting the number of how many attended in total, doing it manually for large groups is also inaccurate. As people come in and out, if you are only watching the number of total participants, you miss the increase in number when people join after others leave. If an approximate is ok, then it’s fine. 🙂
Ryan Marks 3:08 am on August 21, 2020

Are there additional metrics that we should collect?

Is it worthwhile to keep up with the number of discussion groups an attendee participates? Attendees in the top percentile could be identified as a “Super Learner” and possibly given badge. If we were to survey discussion group attendees, it would be possible to flag responses from “Super Learners” to give their answers more weight.

If we were to keep up with which people attended which discussion group, it’s possible their attendance could appear in the Activity section of the user’s profile. Similar to how a WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. attendee can opt-out of being listed on the Attendees page, it would be good to provide an option for discussion group attendees to hide this activity from appearing on their profile.
jillbinder 3:17 am on August 21, 2020
Are there additional metrics that we should collect?

I will mention what I collect, in case it inspires anything useful for this different purpose:
- City
- Country
- Email
- Public speaking confidence score before & after (self-rated out of 10)
- Testimonials
- What went well
- What didn’t go well
Andrea Middleton 9:32 pm on August 21, 2020

It seems like what we really want to measure is whether, and how much, people are learning.

Now, that’s a difficult thing for learners to self-assess, because you don’t know what you don’t know. To understand what people are learning, there’s always comprehension testing (assuming people take the quiz or test), and then there’s the speaker training approach, which is to assess confidence.

I like pre- and post-training confidence surveys, because they allow us to track whether the training made any change at all, but of course someone feeling confident about something… doesn’t really connect to whether they actually are more skilled, right? Ideally, we’d want someone with the skills (a teacher for example) to assess whether a learner has built the skills they’ve been taught in the lesson.

I wonder how other learning platforms that rely on asynchronous learning, assess the success of their lessons? The closest we can get to success might be a combination of self-guided comprehension questions, plus a pre- and post-workshop confidence score…. but I’d love to know how other platforms address this.

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