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 The default role is OpenLearner; if you want them to be able to review an unpublished course, you will need to select Reviewer.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.

Briefing another user

When you brief someone else to review your course, it’s important to be specific about the level of changes you want them to make or the comments that you would like them to offer. For example, you may only have time or opportunity to have typos corrected. Conversely, you may want someone to test your course from the viewpoint of a learner and to highlight anything that should be clearer.

Course content

Unless you brief them to do otherwise, generally we recommend that the person checking your course should:

• proofread the text for consistency and sense
• ensure that the spelling and grammar are correct
• ensure that the text adheres to any house style guides/conventions
• check headings
• check numbering and sequences
• check that links go to the correct page
• check that cross-references to other parts of the course
• check that the references are correctly cited and listed.

You may also want them to carry out a final check of the accuracy of your content – especially if they are subject experts. 

User testing

As well as asking someone else to check your course’s content having, user testing can be useful for various purposes.

You may find it useful to use the following checklist:

• Navigation: Does it work? Can users find their way through your course successfully? Are there any dead ends? Is the structure of the course clear? If a learner lands anywhere in the course is it clear where they are?
• Accessibility: Have you provided transcripts for all the AV materials you have uploaded? Are all your in-text links labelled usefully for users who rely on screen readers?
• Copyright: Do all your images, videos and audio files have suitable captions, acknowledging the source and licensing information if necessary?
• Keeping learners in the course: Do you have instructions to view external links in a new tab or window so that learners do not navigate away from the site?
• Technical aspects: Do the interactive features work? Does the course work across different internet browsers and on tablets and mobile phones? Do all external links work? Do all videos and audio recordings work?
• Badges or certificates: Do these appear correctly when a test user has completed the course?

Many of these issues may have been spotted already and so may not be applicable to your course. However, it is worth noting that the purpose of user testing is to get the course reviewed by someone from the perspective of a learner. Sometimes things that appear obvious to an author are not clear to a learner who is new to the course and perhaps also to online learning.