Testing of e-learning lessons

Hi David,

This is an interesting topic, if only because there is a fine line between speeding up the testing process to ensure efficiency vs degrading the quality of the testing itself.

One thing we've found is that no one person can fully test a course they themselves have produced. Everyone knows how their project is supposed to work and that influences how we 'test' it so we always ensure that at least two other people (that haven't been involved in the build) test the content. This helps to unearth learning design/navigation issues as well as bugs or glitches.

Definitely a good question to raise David.

I also alter variables on occasion depending on what needs to be tested. I do the same not just for myself but also when inviting others to test/review.

Speaking of which, Harri is correct in that other people are highly likely to spot things that we, as designers/developers, can easily miss. This applies not only to SMEs and stakeholders but also a pilot group of learners. Here's a post I wrote on my blog a couple of weeks ago: Involve your audience.

Thank you for your comments Simon and I agree with Harri too. I have put in a feature request for a trigger interaction flow chart to be generated through the publish menu. What are your thoughts on this feature?

Do you mean a flowchart that can be made to appear during a preview (or indeed a full publish), whereupon all variables are displayed and can be tweaked ... thus allowing a reviewer to set the parameters they want to review under?

Hi Simon, a published flowchart that displays all triggers and variables for each slide and how they interconnect. This would be used for a technical review to ensure a project will operate as required. You would be able to pinpoint any problem quite easy with a flow chart. If the software could display problematic areas with a cross or something like that it would be very valuable.