eLearning Revision Doesn’t Have to be a Nightmare
By Admin
It happens, you’ve created your course and everything is running smoothly but revision time comes and everything seems to fall apart. Well, don’t be scared of the revision nightmare any longer. We’re here to help!
The first thing you need to do is sit down and define what content changes you need to make or what activities will require additional changes. Speak with your instructional designers and LMS provider to determine what are the easy fixes and what items will require significant work to change. You want to do all of this before you kickoff the revision project so you have a clear guideline of what needs to be done.
Once you know what needs to be revised and how long certain revisions will take you want to create revision deadlines and STICK TO THEM! Create clear and concise objectives and goals, as well as deadlines for getting your revisions to your LMS provider. You need enough time to completely review the course but you don’t want to take so long reviewing for changes that the process is drawn out and you acquire additional charges.
Rather than emailing your team for their input on revisions, consider keeping the process streamlined. Multiple people replying to an email with revisions can become extremely confusing and overwhelming. When you have multiple team members revising the material, consider keeping the material in a collaborative cloud tool, like Google Drive, so the whole team can joint-edit the document(s) and leave comments, notes and suggestions for approval. That way once all revisions are reviewed and agreed upon by your team you can send it to your LMS provider in one clear and concise document.
When revising a course, make sure there is one team member that has the final say on revisions and design. With too many hands in the fire there can be a redundancy and miscommunication that could lead to another round of revisions and can cost you money. To avoid this disaster, appoint a leader of the course revision who will communicate all final revised materials and changes to the LMS provider and will give the final approval on the project. This is probably one of the most important things to do because this will alleviate a lot of stress on the team when it comes to the revision process.
Make sure all involved team members are contributing to the revision process from the beginning so no one is jumping in at the last minute with their input after most of the significant content has been changed, edited or developed. It is better for the team as a whole to work collaboratively from the very beginning of the revision process.
Finally, even with a project manager make sure you establish appropriate permissions to all team members such as editing spelling or grammar mistakes. Sometimes it wastes more time to submit spelling fixes for approval than it would to just change them right then. So make sure the team knows what they can edit and what needs to be submitted for approval so you can improve turnaround time on revisions and your LMS provider can tackle the more complex revising.
Hopefully, these little tips can help you be better prepared for your next course revision. Remember, it doesn’t have to be a terrifying nightmare. Just stick to your deadlines, appoint a project manager and outline your goals and permissions to your team members and you will have no problem surviving the revision process. Good luck!
