We are building 15 courses for a client and each course has 10 - 20 hyperlinks to external websites that are crucial for the course (as in the learner needs the content in the external websites to answer questions and advance). This decision was made by the client long before I was put on the project and now we are looking at 8 courses already built and launched to the public with no plan on maintaining these links. Anyone have any best practices they use to maintain hyperlinks in a course?
Thanks so much for posting your question here in the E-Learning Heroes Community ... it's a good one!
Since the links are from external websites you really have no control over if/when they get changed, or if the content on the webpages changes. If this is important material in the course (which you say it is), then as long as users are actively taking the course, I think it would probably be wise to have someone doing a regular (once a month? more?) check of the links just to make sure everything is looking fine and dandy. The person performing the check doesn't even need to access the course itself, just check out all the links in a web browser and make sure everything looks good on those pages.
So yeah, periodic usability testing is my proposed solution. Maybe another community member might have another trick or some type of automated way to check for changes on a website... But I'm just not aware of that myself... Hope this helps :) Good luck!
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Hi there Ellen!
Thanks so much for posting your question here in the E-Learning Heroes Community ... it's a good one!
Since the links are from external websites you really have no control over if/when they get changed, or if the content on the webpages changes. If this is important material in the course (which you say it is), then as long as users are actively taking the course, I think it would probably be wise to have someone doing a regular (once a month? more?) check of the links just to make sure everything is looking fine and dandy. The person performing the check doesn't even need to access the course itself, just check out all the links in a web browser and make sure everything looks good on those pages.
So yeah, periodic usability testing is my proposed solution. Maybe another community member might have another trick or some type of automated way to check for changes on a website... But I'm just not aware of that myself... Hope this helps :) Good luck!
Thanks Nicole!!
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