Elearning reviews don’t need to be difficult to manage, but they can quickly get out of control. Have you ever worked on elearning projects where you’ve got to version v20.0 of the versions that don’t ever seem to stop? You’ve released the course or module and the comments still keeping coming from the development teams and the stakeholders.
It is important to agree with the project team how many reviews that you ‘need’ and how you are going to manage clients. It is easy to try and force a number of changes requests but if your client needs more time to work with changes you need a solution.
Often the reason for the change process taking so long is the lack of a process and that you don’t have a review platform. There are lots of platforms that you can use and it is unlikely that one platform will be suitable for each stage of development. Google Docs might be great for scripts, Review 360 for development – you need to identify the right tool for each stage.
The successful review involves managing where all the reviews come in from. Have you ever sent something out for review and then the comments have come flying in from email, text, whatsapp, voice, phone and personal comments! You’ve got no chance to log them and you will probably miss some of them. Customers get frustrated, you look like you don’t have control of the process and the number of releases increases.
Work out how you will log them, capture them and incorporate them into the next version. Working with Articulate storyline we’ve been using the review platform. It has been brilliant for us. Working with customers we’ve encouraged them to capture all feedback on the review platform. You might need to help new users with a guide on how to use the review platform and help them with the migration to the platform but it is worth it. Initially you’ll find that people might be against using a platform and will want to carrying on using email. You need to share with them that they are one part of the project and that you need to get everyone to collaborate, you need to share updates, work in real time and email really isn’t the best tool for collating feedback and moving the project forward.
Not everyone likes the review platform, that’s fine. We’ve done some training with clients and it does make a huge difference. We’ve delivered Articulate storyline courses and everyone involved can see changes and we can capture them in one place. The value is that we can show old versions, current versions and also export to a CSV file. The key tool is collaboration – getting everyone to capture feedback in one place. If Articulate Review 360 doesn’t work for you (you might be using a different development tool), then you need to find a different review tool. There are loads of tools available, but make that move away from email and looking for something that works in the cloud, allows for collaboration and works in real time.
If you are not using Storyline then a Google sheet and set something up that allows everyone to capture their comments. The key is to avoid multiple feedback coming in from multiple channels. The advantage of a Google Sheet is that you can all work in the same document and you have less issues with version control.
Critically, people solve problems, not systems. You’ll still need to work through the comments, manage the process and also ensure that you’ve collated everything. Don’t just rely on the software to manage your review process for you.
The value of collaboration and using a tool is at the end or after each release where you can show your audit trail and explain how you’ve managed each set of change requests.
Changes can be overwhelming if you get them from different channels but if you can collate them you might find that several of the requests are the same, you’ll quickly identify this and it will save you time.
If you start capturing your feedback you might find an area of improvement within your team – are you missing something, is there something that you could do differently? Is there something that your client is looking for in your work that you are not doing?
Feedback and reviews are an opportunity for you to look at ways in which you can improve your process and develop
