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Testing your course

Enrolling another user

It is important to test your open course before you make it live for users.

We recommend that you invite someone else to work through it with fresh eyes: they may not be as familiar with the content, navigation and structure as you, and they might be able to spot issues that you have missed. This is especially important if you have any assessments in the course that count towards a badge, statement of participation or custom certificate.

If you have the Course Manager role you can invite someone to review your draft course by manually enrolling them and giving them Reviewer permissions.

  • To manually enrol a user, go to the Administration block on the left-hand side of the screen. Click on OpenLearners and then Enrolled users.
  • This opens the Enrolled users page, which includes a table listing everyone enrolled on the course and their roles. Click on the Enrol users button.
  • In the Enrol users box that appears, enter the email address of the person you want to enrol in the Search box. Note that this person must have created an OpenLearn Create account using the email address you are searching, and they must have logged in to their account for them to be available to enrol.
  • In the Assign role drop-down menu, select the role that you would like to give to the person you are enrolling on the course. The default role is OpenLearner; if you want them to be able to review an unpublished course, you will need to select Reviewer. Then click on the Enrol users button. 

If you don’t have the Course Manager role, please contact the OpenLearn Create team on openlearncreate@open.ac.uk to request that the user is given a Reviewer role for your course. Again, you will need to first ask the person to log in to OpenLearn Create so we can find their account in the user database.

You may have chosen to develop your open course publicly, making it live while still uploading and reorganising your content, perhaps with collaborators to pick up feedback on your pedagogic approach. However, testing in these circumstances is still good practice: although you may have ironed out most problems, if you have reorganised content at a later stage there could be broken links or other navigational issues to fix.