What is Good Quality elearning?

This post is written by Taruna Goel.

How many times do you wonder if the elearning course you are making is of good quality? All the time? Most of the time? Atleast sometime?

I am sure there are enough matrices and checkpoints with the Reviewing/Quality Assurance/Testing teams that also give you the quality figures - defects/hour is the norm. The general belief is Zero Defects = Good quality. More the number of defects, poorer is the quality.

But what is a defect? Is it those grammatical mistakes? Is it the text-graphic mismatch? Is it the two-pixel shift? Or is it something more? Are we focusing on what really matters?

Here's an interesting article around what is quality and a list of guidelines on how to evaluate it.

"We tend to judge quality only from the perspective of our own domain. Consider the views of all the stakeholders: the training manager; the designer/developer; the system administrator/IT manager that will host the application; and, of course, the end users. In some cases quality measures are of no concern to one stakeholder while of considerable importance to another. Learner-centered design would propose that you make all decisions exclusively for the learners' benefit. Yet, all stakeholders must be partners if success is to be achieved. Since development and delivery are a team effort, one must weigh all viewpoints on what constitutes quality. "

The article/site provides a list of factors (quality measures) that you can use to evaluate elearning. Since it’s a list of 22 (guidelines), you can assign weightage and create a scorecard of the most important quality measures that matter to you!

For each factor, you enter a score (scale of 1-5), multiply it with the weightage, and obtain an adjusted score. Add up the adjusted scores for all factors to obtain a total score. Use this total score to compare one elearning course to another or better still, develop a target score for your team and evaluate it against your goal!

This is a fresh perspective on quality - it still may have the much-dreaded 'rejections' - but this time, you reject - because YOU evaluate the quality of your course before the Reviewing/Quality Assurance/Testing/Customer teams do!

A guide to guidelines?

A friend who works with an NGO was recently pestering me to help her put together a set of guidelines for a very specific target group. The topic is controversial and for our purposes not important. Anyway, she had some notion that I do something like a curriculum design 'or something of that nature' for a living and so can help her. Well, having taken time off from work and gotten used to the luxuries of lotus-eating, with consternation, I proceeded to draft a mail in reply to her pleadings. Writing Guidelines- sounded pretty nichy and relevant so I thought it would be interesting to share some of my thoughts and also get some from our community. Also, i get to offload some work and go back to my lotus-eating ways ;-) And Veronica better appreciate all my hard work :-D.
>>If the objective of your assignment is to provide a> training kit for the target audience, you need to take into account their comfort with the language you will use for the guidelines. So do a bit of research and choose a language that would suit them.
>> Within a language, take care again to stick to a level that would communicate clearly- for example avoid> jargon (if the audience is not privy to this particular jargon).
>> Other things you can do is to organise the guidelines in a specific way that would be more intuitive. For example, look at categorising them into relevant topics/sections- also label these categories to provide the users with a mental model and also for easy reference. Provide this list of categories upfront so users can choose to move to guidelines of interest.
>> You can also organise using other principles- just choose something that will make sense to the users and be intuitive. Other organising principles include chronological sequencing, simple to complex, general> to specific.
>> Guidelines can use the format of "Dos" and "Don'ts"
>> Highlight consequences of not following guidelines.
>> Depending on the audience, see if you need to provide examples and cases to explain/illustrate the guidelines. Include images, diagrams, graphs and pictures for promoting better understanding and retaining interest.
>> Will it make sense to include things like quizzes and exercises?
>> At the outset, don't forget to articulate the relevance of the guidelines to the users- why and how it will help them.