The learning curve blog

Helpful advice for online course creators, businesses, and entrepreneurs

5 Steps for Testing Course Elements

by | Aug 2, 2019 | Tips & Tricks

In our last post in the content delivery blog series, we covered how to upload course elements. Now we’re going to demonstrate how to test your course elements before delivering the course to learners. 

Why should you test your course elements?

It might seem like a waste of time to test course elements, or, at best, an unnecessary precaution. However, testing is absolutely vital to the content delivery process. You want to make sure that the content you’re delivering is errorless. There are a couple reasons for this. First, content with errors looks bad to your potential users. If they try to take a course and encounter a bug, then they will be less likely to trust your content. This distrust leads to the second consequence of not testing your course elements: you lose business. Customers will go elsewhere if your content is buggy.

Diligent testing will ensure that you don’t deliver bad content to your users. In return, you’ll mitigate customer turnover, and you’ll keep selling your content. Long story short, testing your course elements is important and good for business.

How to test course elements

The actual testing process won’t take too much effort on your end. Mostly, it just requires you to click a few buttons and take the course that you’ve created. There may be a few extra things you have to do depending on which types of elements you’ve included in your course, like tests or assignments, but if you follow these steps, you’ll root out any errors or bugs in your course content.

1. Select the appropriate course and click “Preview Course.”

2. On the new screen, click “Start Course.”

3. Complete the entire course. This step could mean that you have to watch through an entire video, click through an interactive learning module, preview a PowerPoint presentation, or do any other content-related activity. Regardless of the course format, finish it, checking for errors or bugs the whole way through.

4. If your course has a quiz or a test at the end, take it. Not all course elements will feature a quiz or test. However, if your courses do have them, you want to ensure that end-of-course assessments operate how you intend them to. To the best of your ability, provide enough correct answers necessary to pass the course. Passing the assessment will be important for the next step.

5. Make sure the course completes correctly. If your course completes how it’s supposed to, you will receive a message in a green banner that reads “Completed!” after you finish the course. You will receive another message saying your course is incomplete if there is a problem with completing the course. If your course has an assessment at the end, make sure that you receive the “Completed!” message once you answer enough questions correctly to pass.

You’ve now finished testing your course element. If you encounter any errors or bugs, inform the person in your organization responsible for creating content of the issue. As long as it’s an issue with the content, have the appropriate people fix the problem with the course element. If it seems to be an issue with the LMS, contact DigitalChalk’s technical support team for assistance.

That’s all it takes to test a course element. It involves a little extra time, but it’s time well spent. With error-free course content, you won’t have to worry about losing customer loyalty and business. On top of that, you’ve taken steps to secure your place as a high quality content provider.

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