Ratings Analytics and Reports - Article

Purpose and Scope

Ratings are a lightweight but powerful feedback mechanism used to capture overall learner sentiment upon completion of a training activity. Unlike detailed surveys or questionnaires, ratings focus on impression rather than explanation—answering a simple question: How was this experience?

On your behalf, ratings can be enabled selectively at the activity level. This is intentional. Ratings are particularly effective for:

• Open or elective training
• Commercial or externally visible programs
• Partner enablement and customer education
• Discovery-driven learning catalogs

They are less suitable for mandatory or compliance-driven training, where low ratings may create bias without offering actionable explanation. In those cases, questionnaires, content engagement analytics, or adaptive learning insights are better tools for diagnosing issues.

Ratings Analytics and Reports are designed to help administrators and learning owners answer questions such as:

• Which activities are perceived most positively by learners?
• How many participants are contributing ratings?
• Are ratings trending up or down over time?
• How do ratings differ across regions, organizations, or activity types?
• Can we document sentiment as part of quality assurance or governance?

Ratings Analytics Overview

Ratings Analytics provides a visual, aggregated overview of all activities that received at least one rating during the selected period.

Key Counters

• Unique Users—The total number of distinct users who submitted at least one rating during the selected period
• Responses—The total number of rating submissions during the period. A single user may contribute multiple responses if they rated multiple activities

• Blocked users are included in analytics
• Deleted users are excluded
• Users remain included even if their signups are later cancelled or expired
• Cancelled or deleted activities are excluded from analytics

Rating Distribution (Horizontal Bar)

The horizontal bar visualizes how ratings are distributed across the 1–5 scale, showing both count and percentage for each rating value.

This provides an immediate snapshot of sentiment:

• High concentration of 4–5 → strong perceived quality
• Wide distribution → mixed experience or inconsistent delivery
• Heavy 1–2 concentration → potential quality or expectation issues

This view is especially useful for leadership and catalog owners who need a quick sense of how offerings are received overall.

Breakdown by Activity

The Breakdown section lists all activities that received ratings in the selected period.

For each activity, you can see:

• Title – Activity name
• Self-enrollment – Whether self-enrollment is enabled
• Type – Online, Classroom, Webinar, Learning Path, etc.
• Responses – Number of ratings submitted
• Rating – Average rating across all responses

By default:

• Activities are ordered by highest average rating
• The top 10 activities are shown initially with search by activity title or load more results. 

This view supports comparison, prioritization, and quality benchmarking across the training portfolio.

Filters and Segmentation

Ratings Analytics can be filtered by:

• Category – tagging created by your administrators 
• Activity type – Online, Classroom, Webinar, Learning Path, etc.
• Organization (with organization layer logic applied)
• Rating value (1 to 5)
• Country – User profile setting

Rating Filter Behavior

When filtering by a specific rating value (e.g. 4):

• Unique Users, Responses, and the Horizontal Bar show only exact matches (rating = 4)
• Breakdown shows activities with an average rating between 4.0 and 4.9

This allows administrators to identify activities that consistently perform within a target quality band.

Ratings Report

While Ratings Analytics focuses on visual summaries and trends, the Ratings Report provides an exportable, record-level view of individual rating submissions. It is designed for deeper analysis, comparisons across cohorts or deliveries, and external reporting.

The report is accessed via [Get report] (download icon) and can be scoped using filters:

• Rated date range (from / to)
• Activity selection, allowing you to include all activities or focus on a specific set—useful when the same program is delivered multiple times across periods, cohorts, or instructors and needs to be compared consistently.

This makes the Ratings Report well suited for longitudinal analysis, quality assurance, and stakeholder reporting beyond what is visible in analytics alone.

Typical Report Fields

Permissions, Data Access, and Organization Layer

Rating Analytics and Report is governed by role-based permissions and the organization layer. Users can only see data they are authorized to access based on their role, organizational affiliation, and scope of responsibility.

In practice:

• Data visibility is limited to permitted organizations, activities, and entities
• Parent organizations can see aggregated sub-organization data; sub-organizations cannot see upward or sideways
• Blocked users remain visible for historical accuracy; deleted users are excluded for privacy compliance; Cancelled and expired enrollments remain visible for audit and traceability
• The same rules apply consistently to both on-screen analytics and exported reports

This ensures secure, consistent, and audit-ready access to data across the platform.

When to Use Ratings vs Other Feedback Tools

Ratings are designed to provide a quick, high-level signal of learner sentiment, while other feedback tools offer deeper diagnostic insight. The table below helps clarify when Ratings are the right tool—and when more detailed feedback or engagement analytics should be used instead.

Real-World Use Case: Public Training Portfolio Quality Monitoring

A professional training provider offers a catalog of optional, paid courses across multiple regions. Ratings are enabled on these activities and displayed on course description pages to support discovery and enrollment decisions.

Learning administrators monitor Ratings Analytics monthly/quarterly to:

• Identify top-performing courses to promote further
• Detect declining sentiment early
• Compare delivery formats (online vs classroom)
• Spot regional differences in learner perception

When an activity’s rating drops, administrators pull the Ratings Report and correlate sentiment with delivery conditions, instructor assignments, or recent content changes—before deciding whether deeper investigation via questionnaires or content engagement analytics is needed.

This approach ensures that ratings remain a trustworthy signal, while deeper analytics are used to drive improvement behind the scenes.

Best-Practice Guide: When Not to Enable Ratings

Ratings are a powerful and widely trusted mechanism for capturing overall learner sentiment. However, they are not universally appropriate. In some contexts, enabling ratings can introduce bias, reduce motivation, or obscure the real learning objectives.

The table below outlines common scenarios where ratings are not recommended, why that is the case, and what to use instead.

Used deliberately, ratings act as a trusted recommendation signal. Used indiscriminately, they risk becoming noise rather than value.

Special Case: Individually Scheduled Instructor-Led Training

Ratings are generally not recommended when training is delivered as many individually scheduled, instructor-led activities—even when content, structure, and learning objectives are identical. This is especially relevant when deciding whether ratings should be public-facing or primarily used for internal analysis and comparison.

In these scenarios, each session exists as a separate activity entity on the platform. Ratings are therefore collected per session, not across a shared or recurring training offering. As a result:

• Ratings reflect the experience of one specific session, not the training concept or program as a whole
• Identical sessions are not aggregated, because they are technically unrelated activities

While such ratings can still be useful internally—for example, for back-office reporting or instructor feedback—they do not work well as public-facing recommendations.

In practice, this limits the value of ratings as:

• A discovery or comparison signal
• A confidence indicator for prospective participants
• A representation of overall program quality

Recommended approach instead

For this delivery model, consider the following alternatives:

• Use structured questionnaires to collect comparable feedback across sessions—especially when ratings do not need to be public or part of the sign-up flow. This makes it easier to aggregate, filter, and analyze results afterwards (for example, by instructor, cohort, or region)
• If needed, present a manually curated statement / ratings on the activity description page (such as overall satisfaction, testimonials, or program-level insights), updated periodically rather than calculated automatically

This approach ensures that insight is drawn from comparable, aggregated data, rather than fragmented session-level scores that can unintentionally misrepresent the true value of the training offering.