Do you test your content continually as you build your course? Did you know you can use your Firmwater demo site to replicate your end user’s experience? If you already use it, then kudos to you! If not, it’s worthwhile to read up about why testing your content is helpful in the long run. To get you started, here are three reasons why we think it helps:
- Test to understand your learners’ experience.
By interacting with the course content from a learner’s point of view, you ensure that your content looks good and is being delivered the right way. This puts everything in perspective for you and helps you in the long run if ever you need to assist your learners with support requests. - Test to understand your content behaviour.
Much of the learners’ experience depends on the way your content was authored. Regardless of the tool you use, you should aim to test your content as you’re building it to avoid any content-related problems in the future. Test to check if it is behaving the way you’ve published it to behave. Are quiz scores being recorded and displayed properly? Is the navigation clear and easy? Is the course status correct? Are there any audio, video or animation issues? - Test to understand the LMS and better navigate its features.
A big part of content delivery to your learners is course assembly in the LMS. If your course is made up of several components and you used LMS features such as prerequisites, it would be wise to double-check if the content behaviour is consistent with the enabled features. It would also be helpful to run reports and ensure that necessary data is being saved (e.g. running an interaction data report to see if quiz results are being recorded).
Testing content can seem to be time-consuming at first, but its value will help you determine best authoring practices and lower the number of support requests from your end users. We hope that after reading this article you get in the habit of actively testing your content. Remember that we are always there to support you during this process.
Note: If you’ve never used your demo site before, please contact us and we’ll help you set up your account.