How to QA your e-learning course
Before you deliver your E-learning course to your learners, you must stop and make sure your course is 100% good to go. You don’t want to risk launching your E-learning course to hundreds or maybe thousands of learners to get you missed a typo, or worse, something doesn’t work. The best way to avoid this embarrassment is to conduct a quality assurance or QA check. Here are three tips for doing just that. Tip number one. QA your E-learning course early and often. As you’re developing your E-learning course, it’s always a good idea to check your work in real-time. To keep it simple, I prefer to mention QA along the way. What this means is that when you’re designing a slide, animating content, or developing an interaction, preview it to make sure it looks and functions the way you want. Tip number two.
Try to break your E-learning course. No matter what tool you might be using to develop your E-learning course, it’s easy to overlook a functionality mistake. The truth is, most errors in an E-learning course are discovered when learners try to do what they aren’t supposed to do. So the best way to avoid this is by literally trying to break your course when you’re QA-ing it. Do the unexpected. Click on things in a different order than you intended, and see what happens. I guarantee you’ll find issues that need to be fixed. And finally, tip number three. Get a second set of eyes. You know, sometimes the best people to help you QA your E-learning course are the ones who’ve never seen it in the first place. During your QA process, get a second or even a third set of eyes to look at and test your course. Whether it’s a coworker, a friend, a family member, you’ll be amazed at the number of issues they’ll discover that somehow you managed to miss. All right, so the next time you’re about to launch your next E-learning course, stop and take some time to conduct a quality assurance check and make sure it’s good to go. Trust me, you’ll be happy that you did.
How to conduct user acceptance testing of your e-learning course
When you launch your completed e-learning course, you’ll likely get feedback from your learners that you’ll wish you had gotten beforehand. And while this will be frustrating, a simple thanks to avoiding this is often by letting some, not all, of your learners, test your e-learning course before you launch it to everyone else. And this is where user acceptance testing can help, which is simply gathering a small group of folks from your target audience and having them test your course. So here are a couple of tips that you simply can use to assist conduct user acceptance testing of your e-learning course. First, make sure to gather a diverse mix of testers. While you’ll have a specific audience for your e-learning course, there’s likely to be tons of diversity within that population. And so you should make sure you’re testing your course with a group of folks that accurately reflects your audience. This means having a mix of ages, genders, ethnicities, or anything else that captures the diversity of your learners. Second, don’t explain how to use your course or justify your design decisions. When you’re watching your testers take your e-learning course you’re bound to see some folks who get stuck or aren’t sure what to do.
In these situations, you’ll be very tempted to help them by saying things like, “Oh, you’re supposed to click here,” or, you know, “I designed it to do this.” And the truth is, if your testers get stuck or aren’t sure how to use your course, that’s a sign there’s something wrong with the design of your course that you need to fix. Third, debrief and ask questions. Remember, user acceptance testing is about getting feedback from your learners. After your testers have finished testing your course, take some time to get their reactions. Was the course easy to use? Did they get stuck? If so, how? Was the content valuable? What could be changed to make it a better experience? These are all questions that can help you improve your e-learning course. So the next time you’re about to launch an eLearning course, consider user acceptance testing to get the feedback you need to make your course that much better.
How to organize your eLearning project files
When you’re nearing the top of your eLearning project, it is easy to quickly advance to a subsequent project without ensuring you’ve properly packed away your previous project. At now, you likely have all types of project files everywhere on your computer, storyboard files, audio files, graphics, and source files from your e-learning authoring tool. The last item you would like to try to do before moving on to your next project is to misplace or lose any of these files. You never know when you will need them again to form updates. to try to do this, I like to recommend organizing your files into a project folder. Let me show you an example and provides you some tips for doing just that. My first tip is to stay all of your project files together. for instance, I just finished work on a replacement e-learning course on customer service and you will notice here, I even have a project folder for this course. Now if I open it, this folder contains everything associated with this project. this suggests I do not get to search my computer to seek out the files. they are not scattered everywhere on my desktop, they’re alright here, organized in a way that I can find anything that I’d need.My second tip is to make subfolders for every one of your major assets. As you’ll see here in my project folder, I’ve created subfolders for almost everything, including graphics, audio, video, storyboards, and even my project planning documents. I even have an archive folder here where I can store previous versions of storyboards and other files. Since you never know once you might get to revert to a previous version, I keep it all here. and eventually, my third tip is to copy your files to the cloud. As you’ll see, this project folder is sitting on my desktop, which isn’t ideal. If my computer decided to suddenly die, I could lose days or maybe a month’s worth of labor. And trust me, that’s happened to me before, so I always recommend backing up and saving your files to the cloud. That’s only one example of how I prefer to arrange and save my eLearning project files. So before you finish your next e-learning project, confirm to require a couple of minutes to arrange your files. Trust me, it’ll prevent tons of headaches within the future.
How to conduct an e-learning project retrospective
Once you’ve finished work on an E-learning project, it’s only too easy to maneuver on to subsequent one stupidly about how you’ll improve your process. And this is often where an E-learning project retrospective can help. Whether you call it a retrospective, a postmortem, debriefing, or a wrap-up meeting, the aim is simple: to gauge your performance and reflect on the successes and failures of your last project to spot ways you’ll improve within the future. So here are three practical tips for a way you’ll conduct your very own E-learning project retrospective. Tip favorite. Invite everyone involved within the project. You know, most E-learning projects involve multiple people contributing to the creation of the ultimate E-learning course you developed. Whether it is a material expert who provided their knowledge or the administrator of your learning management system who helped you publish your course, they contributed to the project in a method or another. confirm to ask these folks along with side anyone else who may need something to feature in your retrospective. Tip number two. Discuss what did and didn’t go well.
Remember, the retrospective aims to find out from and improve your processes. So encourage those folks who are participating to share what they thought did and didn’t go well. Just confirm to stay objective, don’t point fingers, and do not spend an excessive amount of time on the bad stuff. confirm to celebrate any successes you had. and eventually, tip number three. Identify what you’ll do differently next time. Sometimes it isn’t always clear what the proper answer is to repair the problems you would possibly have identified during your E-learning project retrospective, but the goal isn’t to seek out the right solution. The goal is to experiment with small tweaks or changes to your process and evaluate whether or not they worked. Those are just a couple of tips you’ll use to conduct a project retrospective.