Using Work Samples to Assess eLearning in Jordanian Companies

Imagine that every officer in a claims team has a green tick next to the new eLearning course. The learning platform shows full completion, healthy quiz scores, and a certificate for each person. A week later, a team leader in Amman opens three new claim files and finds the same incomplete notes and the same vague messages to customers that the course was built to fix.

The report is accurate. It simply measures attendance: who enrolled, who opened each screen, and who answered enough questions to pass. What the team leader needs to know is different. After the eLearning, can each employee produce the piece of work the role requires, to the standard the company expects?

This article explains how HR and digital learning teams in Jordanian companies can answer that question with work samples: a small piece of real or realistic work, collected after eLearning, scored against a clear standard and linked directly to the employee’s role. The method does not replace your platform data. It adds the evidence the platform cannot provide.

Attendance and Capability Are Different Questions

Most eLearning reports describe participation. Enrollment, completion, time spent, and quiz scores are useful for planning and follow-up, but they show only that an employee saw the content and could recall part of it soon afterwards. Capability is something else: the ability to do the task correctly, in the conditions of the job.

Learning evaluation frameworks draw the same line. Will Thalheimer’s Learning-Transfer Evaluation Model (LTEM) differentiates between knowledge, decision-making and task performance, and states that its lower tiers represent methods that are inadequate to validate learning success. A completion certificate sits on the attendance side of that line. A scored work sample sits on the capability side.

When a manager asks whether a corporate eLearning program worked, you can answer with two figures instead of one: how many employees completed it, and how many can now produce the required output to standard. The gap between those two figures is where the useful decisions are made.

What Counts as a Work Sample After eLearning

In personnel assessment, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management describes work sample tests as tasks or work activities that mirror the tasks employees perform on the job, scored by trained assessors who observe the work or by measuring its outcome. That definition comes from hiring, but the logic transfers well to eLearning assessment: instead of asking employees about the task, you ask them to do a small part of it and score the result.

After eLearning, a work sample usually takes one of two forms:

• A prepared sample: every employee completes the same short task from a realistic case pack, such as a mock customer request with its documents attached. Everyone faces the same case, so the comparison is fair.

• A sample from real work: the supervisor selects two or three outputs the employee produced after the eLearning, such as files, emails, or reports, and scores them with the same standard. This shows whether the skill appears in daily work, although cases vary in difficulty.

A work sample is not a longer quiz, a project, or an annual appraisal. It is one bounded piece of work, small enough to score in minutes and close enough to the job that a supervisor recognizes it immediately.

Step 1: Choose a Small Sample Linked to the Role

Start from the role, not from the eLearning content. Ask which output this role produces that the eLearning course was meant to improve, and how a supervisor would know it was done well. If you cannot name the output, the learning objective is probably too broad to assess.

Keep the sample small: one output, completed in 15 to 30 minutes, that reflects the decision or step the course focused on.

Some examples from common Jordanian work settings:

• Telecom retail advisor: complete one plan-change request and write the confirmation message the customer will receive.

• Hotel front office agent in Amman or Aqaba: process one reservation amendment and draft the guest’s confirmation email.

• Pharmaceutical warehouse coordinator: check one delivery note against its purchase order and record any discrepancy.

Match the sample to the experience level of the people taking the eLearning. A new hire and a team leader may complete the same eLearning course, but each work sample should reflect what that person’s role actually requires them to produce.

Step 2: Write a Clear Scoring Standard Before You Collect Anything

Without a written standard, two supervisors will score the same sample differently, and employees will see the assessment as personal opinion. Carnegie Mellon University’s Eberly Center defines a rubric as a scoring tool that explicitly represents the performance expectations for a piece of work, and notes that rubrics help ensure consistency across graders. That is exactly what a work sample after eLearning needs.

A practical scoring standard for eLearning assessment has four parts:

• Three to five criteria tied to the role, such as complete information, a correct decision or calculation, the right system step, and clear communication.

• Observable descriptions for each level: what meets the standard, what needs correction, and what is not acceptable, worded so that two reviewers would agree.

• One critical criterion, if the task has one: an error that makes the sample unacceptable whatever the other scores, such as a discount beyond the employee’s authority.

• A short notes field, so the reviewer records what was missing, not only a score.

Before using the standard, ask two reviewers to score the same three samples independently and compare results. Where they disagree, rewrite the description, not the score. This calibration takes less than an hour and protects the credibility of everything that follows.

Step 3: Collect, Score and Respond

Timing matters. Collect the work sample one to three weeks after the eLearning, when employees have had a chance to apply it but before old habits return. A sample collected on the same day still measures short-term recall.

Tell employees in advance what the sample is, who will score it, and how the results will be used. Present it as a check on the eLearning design and on the support people need, not as a disciplinary test. A weak sample should lead to feedback and practice, not to a mark on a file.

Two practical points apply in many Jordanian workplaces:

• Language: work often moves between Arabic and English, with system fields in one language and customer messages in the other. Score the sample in the language the role actually uses, and do not penalize terminology the company itself has not standardized.

• Personal data: samples taken from real work often contain customer or employee details. Remove or replace names, ID numbers, and contact details before files reach reviewers, keep the samples only as long as the review requires, and follow your organization’s data protection policies.

If your eLearning platform lets supervisors record an offline assessment against each learner, store scores and notes there, after testing the employee and manager journeys in your LMS. Then return each scored sample to the employee and give anyone below the standard a short follow-up activity on the criterion they missed. The work sample becomes part of employee learning, not only a measurement.

A Hypothetical Example: Claims Intake at a Jordanian Insurer

The following example is hypothetical and is included only to show how the method works.

An insurance company in Amman launches a 25-minute eLearning course for its motor claims intake officers. The course explains how to open a claim file: which documents to request, how to classify the claim, and what to tell the customer about next steps. Within a month, every officer has completed it.

The eLearning team and the claims manager agree on a prepared work sample. Each officer receives a mock case pack with fictional documents and photos, opens the claim in a training copy of the system, and writes the acknowledgment message. The scoring standard has four criteria: correct documents requested, correct claim category, complete file notes, and a customer message that states the next step and the expected timeline. Requesting the wrong documents is the critical criterion.

Two supervisors calibrate the standard on three samples, then score the rest within a week. The pattern is clear: nearly every officer classifies the claim correctly, but many customer messages leave out the expected timeline. Looking back at the eLearning content, the team sees why. The course explained the classification rules in detail and covered the customer message in a single slide, with no practice.

The response is practical: add a short practice activity on writing the acknowledgment message, give targeted feedback to the officers who missed that criterion, and repeat the work sample with the next intake group. The eLearning completion report never showed this gap. The work sample showed it in a week.

Turning Work Sample Results into Decisions

Read the results criterion by criterion, not only as an overall pass rate, and connect each pattern to a decision:

• Most employees miss the same criterion: the eLearning probably explains that step without letting people practice it. Redesign that part of the course before blaming individuals.

• Errors are scattered across people and criteria: the eLearning may be adequate, and the issue is individual. Use targeted coaching for those employees.

• Prepared samples pass but real-work samples do not: look beyond the eLearning, at workload, system access, unclear authority, or a supervisor who does the task differently.

• Experienced employees pass without needing the course: let them complete the work sample first and skip eLearning content they have already mastered.

Report to managers in the same two columns every time: attended and capable. Over a few cycles, this shifts the conversation about eLearning in your company from how many courses were completed to which roles can now do which tasks, and makes it easier to link learning priorities to what the business actually needs.

Summary

Completion records tell you who attended eLearning. A work sample tells you who can now do the work. By choosing one small output linked to the role, scoring it against a clear and calibrated standard, and collecting it a few weeks after the course, HR and digital learning teams in Jordan can separate attendance from capability without a large evaluation project.

Start with one eLearning course and one role, read the results by criterion, and use them to improve the eLearning as much as to support individuals. The same approach suits fast-changing roles, such as software teams learning a product update, where a short sample shows quickly whether the change has landed.

Click here. If you would like help designing a work sample and scoring standard for one of your eLearning courses, the SkillUp MENA team can talk through your requirements with you.