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4 Best Practices to Ensure a Smooth Review Process

NicoleLegault1's avatar
NicoleLegault1
Community Member
6 years ago

Having a second set of eyes on your e-learning content can go a long way toward helping to ensure you’re putting out quality content. However, the review process can quickly become complicated, drawn-out, and tedious if you don’t follow some core best practices. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who leave conflicting comments and reviewers who take weeks to provide their feedback are just some of the headaches you might have to contend with. Here are a few things to remember the next time you embark on an e-learning project that will include reviews.

Settle On a Review Process Up Front

One key thing you can do is identify what the review process will be up front, during the project planning phase. You want to get an idea of what the process will involve, who the reviewers are, and how many rounds of feedback and edits you will be expected to carry out. You want to make sure everyone is on board and understands their role in the review cycle. For a typical project, you can expect to include at least one to three rounds of review.

Minimize Amount of Reviewers

You’ve probably heard the expression “too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth.” It means too many people adding their input to one thing can ruin it. The same can happen when you have too many reviewers.

When your list of reviewers is lengthy, you’re more likely to get conflicting input from various reviewers that you’ll have to sort out. It can also affect your timelines: the more reviewers you add to the mix, the longer it will likely take for you to get the feedback. Additionally, some reviewers feel they need to leave their “two cents” even if they don’t have any particularly useful feedback to share, which leaves you to sift through unhelpful comments. When you’re choosing reviewers, make sure you choose the right people who will provide the valuable feedback you need.

Provide Guidance to Reviewers

“I don’t like the color of the shirt that the man in the stock image is wearing.” This is real feedback I’ve seen before. One way to minimize useless or unimportant feedback is to provide guidance to your reviewers on what they should be looking for while they review your content. If they’re only reviewing content for factual errors or inconsistencies, let them know. If they’re supposed to be on the lookout for typos and spelling mistakes, spell that out (pun intended!) for them.

Give Reviewers a Deadline

Have you ever sent a course to someone for review and they say “Yeah, I’ll get to it!”... then you still haven’t heard back two weeks later? We’ve all been there. When you send a course over to a reviewer, include a clear due date by which you need to receive the feedback. Give reviewers a fair amount of time—this could be anything from a few days to a few weeks, depending on the reviewer and their workload.

Following these simple best practices will help you streamline your review process and help you succeed on your next project. Do you have any tips of your own related to the review process? Let me know in the comments!


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Published 6 years ago
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  • Hi Nicole, I posted similarly in LI but here goes:

    1) SMEs - if 2 or more, designate a lead to consolidate comments and resolve conflicting comments prior to sending me one file. Also no 'secret' SMEs - identify all reviewers/approvers up front vs. thinking we're done and they say "ok we just need to send to Jill now for her approval"... "Jill????"

    2) Final Content - be sure it's final and all stakeholders have signed off BEFORE you start building SL content so D1 or D2 isn't wasted just getting SME edits on what wasn't really final content.

    3) Project schedule milestones/due dates - Stay on top of them. We're not using 360/Review yet nor a proj mgt app so old school Outlook email it is. My subject is something like "Action Requested - xxxxxxx Draft 1 ready for review" and included is next two milestone notes like "Draft 1 comments due EOD Fri 4.12" and "Due Soon Draft 2 release Wed. 4.17". Lastly, add a follow up reminder to the sent message to fire the morning of due date + 1. Sticking with this example, comments not in my inbox Monday morning 4.15? I'm sending a friendly follow up "Draft 1 comments past due" email.

    4) One I forgot in LI... Translations... we use a translation vendor but policy requires internal native speakers review/edit the translation to ensure it's appropriate for our company environment. We now have the internal reviewers review/edit the Word translation file BEFORE we import into SL so we need only 1 foreign SL draft round they want to see once everything's been adjusted.
    • NicoleLegault1's avatar
      NicoleLegault1
      Community Member
      Thank you so much for leaving your helpful tips, Chris! Good advice!
  • DebrahDownes's avatar
    DebrahDownes
    Community Member
    I'm still on my design journey and really appreciate this article.
    • NicoleLegault1's avatar
      NicoleLegault1
      Community Member
      Thanks for the comment, Debrah! So glad you found this useful and timely for you :)
  • SimonBlair's avatar
    SimonBlair
    Community Member
    Some people might also think that if they have no changes to request they don't need to respond.
    To avoid that issue, I've found it helpful to provide them guidelines on exactly what I'm looking to get back from them, such as:
    "Please respond with one of the following:
    - the content is ready to go as is,
    - minor updates are required (list them), but I do not need to review again before we go live, or
    - major updates are required (list them), and I would like to review again after they have been made."
    • DebrahDownes's avatar
      DebrahDownes
      Community Member
      Thank you, that response recommendation is really simple but helpful.