You’ve launched your education program. Your content is live. Learners are enrolling. But your job is far from over.
Education isn’t a one-and-done project; it’s an ongoing initiative. To build an effective program, you need feedback.
Feedback tells you what’s working, what’s missing, and where your learners need more support. It helps you make better decisions about content design, delivery methods, and learner experience. And it ensures that your education efforts are aligned with your goals, grounded in user behavior, and guided by real-world needs.
Too often, feedback is limited to generic satisfaction scores. While helpful, they’re only part of the picture. To grow and develop your program, you need to listen more deeply and more broadly—to your learners, to those who interact with them, and to your internal teams across the organization.
So where should you start? Let’s break feedback into three core types that will help you build a stronger, smarter, more strategic education program.
3 Types of Feedback to Fuel Your Education Program
If your goal is to drive outcomes—not just deliver content—you’ll need a comprehensive view of how education is landing, what it’s influencing, and where there’s room to improve.
Broadly, feedback falls into three categories:
1. Learner Feedback
This is the most direct and familiar form of feedback. It tells you how learners are engaging with your education content—and whether that engagement is leading to success.
Look for patterns that help you answer:
- Are learners completing content?
- Are they stuck at certain points?
- Is the content helping them achieve intended outcomes?
Sample data points include:
- Qualitative feedback from post-course or in-app surveys
- Enrollment and registration volume
- Drop-off rates within courses or learning paths
- Repeat issues or common friction points in assessments
- Completion rates compared to averages across the platform
2. Learner-Adjacent Feedback
This feedback comes from other touchpoints in the learner’s experience—outside of your education platform—but still closely related to it. It helps you understand where education can better support real-world needs and challenges.
Ask yourself:
- What questions are learners still asking outside of training?
- Where are they struggling after taking the course?
Sample data points include:
- Frequently asked questions or repeat tickets in customer support
- Low engagement or zero-result searches in your Knowledge Base
- Products or features purchased but not successfully implemented
- Sales pipeline delays tied to product or feature confusion
It’s easy to get bogged down here by possibilities. Start small by focusing on one or two adjacent areas for a specific audience. This kind of feedback builds critical cross-functional insight and connects education to broader business impact.
3. Organizational Feedback
Zooming out even further, organizational feedback gives you a top-down view of how education fits into company-wide goals. This helps you align your strategy with what matters most to the business.
You’ll want to investigate:
- Where is the company trying to drive behavior change?
- What are the leading indicators of retention, adoption, or performance?
Sample data points include:
- Trends or gaps revealed in internal surveys like company-wide NPS or CSAT
- Low adoption of specific products or features
- Churn analysis that points to education gaps or onboarding friction
- Inconsistent performance across sales reps, partners, or internal teams
How Often Should You Collect Feedback?
In considering any feedback you plan to integrate, think through the cadence of collection. Will it be ad hoc, tied to specific launches or events? Monthly, as part of a regular check-in? Or ongoing, built into the learner experience?
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer—but consistency matters. Here are a few tips to help guide your approach:
- Start small and scale: Begin with one feedback type (e.g. post-course surveys) before expanding across touchpoints.
- Match frequency to usage: High-traffic programs may benefit from continuous, lightweight collection (e.g., in-app thumbs up/down or embedded polls), while quarterly reviews may suffice for less frequent content.
- Automate where possible: Use automation to trigger surveys or data pulls, reducing manual overhead and ensuring regular input.
- Tie to key milestones: Collect feedback at natural points in the learner journey—after onboarding, after a course is completed, or when new features are rolled out.
- Set a review rhythm: Schedule internal check-ins to review and analyze feedback. Don’t let it pile up—create a habit of acting on it.
Remember: collecting feedback is only useful if you do something with it. Frequency should align not just with how often you ask for input, but how often you use it to inform decisions and iterate on your program.
From Feedback to Forward Motion
Ultimately, your most powerful form of feedback is behavioral data—evidence that learners are changing how they work, think, or engage. This usually requires tying your LMS or content data to systems like your CRM, HRIS, or support platform. It’s not always simple, but the insights are invaluable.
As your program matures, your feedback loop should expand—both in sources and in frequency. By layering learner, learner-adjacent, and organizational feedback, you’ll gain the visibility you need to continuously improve your education program and prove its value across the business.
