A Complete Guide on Quality Assurance (QA) in eLearning Development

complete guide on quality assurance in elearning development (qa)In today’s competitive eLearning industry, maintaining quality of the eLearning courses really matters. In fact, the success of an elearning company depends on the quality of its deliverables in the form of elearning courses.

Quality Assurance (QA) is the most important phase and the final step in the eLearning development process that focusses on delivering an error free or bug free elearning course. In this blog we will go through the following topics to walk you through quality assurance process:

  • What is Quality Assurance (QA)?
  • Why Quality Assurance is so important?
  • The Quality Assurance checklist

What is Quality Assurance (QA)?

Quality Assurance is an ongoing process of identifying bugs and errors in a developed eLearning course. In simple words, QA is a promise made by an eLearning company to their customers for complete satisfaction on their products or services.

Quality Assurance is not just about proofreading content and visuals but includes checking of many elements such as navigation, quizzes, interactivities, compliance, user access, and system compatibility. With so many checks at every stage of the process, it ensures that a defect free eLearning course is published that improve clients satisfaction and leaves a long lasting learning experience on the learners.

Also, ELearning quality assurance is all about making your online course more productive, engaging and, effective. However, eLearning quality assurance is a quite complicated process, as keeping all the quality checks in mind is not possible. Therefore, careful analysis with proper testing is crucial to check various elements for their functionality and to deliver satisfied and desired eLearning course.

Why Quality Assurance in eLearning is so important?

It is incredibly important because it builds trust among clients, boosts confidence levels and, helps to stay in good relations with the client. The benefits of quality assurance will not just boost the feel-good nature of brand, but also bring real value in the following ways:

  1. Saves Time and Money
    Quality Assurance (QA) brings a renewed focus on efficiency, productivity and allows for better testing and compliance process to improve quality or reliability of the course. With a thorough testing process, it becomes easy to diagnose and fix bugs beforehand. Further, when bugs are identified before delivering the course to the client, it translates into huge cost and time saving which in-turn boost accountability.
  2. Boosts Client’s confidence
    Offering top-notch, bug-free and high-quality eLearning courses is incredibly important to create forming long-term working relationship with clients and to boost their confidence level. Quality Assurance can also improve the satisfaction of your customers, thus enhancing the reputation of the company, maintain brand image and, improve client’s loyalty.
  3. Promotes Efficiency and Productivity
    To ensure successful launch of your courses and to achieve win-win solutions, it is indispensable to check the quality beforehand. Nobody likes the chaos of defective software and hurried fixes, therefore being organized with QA testing will allow you to identify errors beforehand and fix them before it reaches the client. When software testing is an integral part of elearning development process, it becomes easy to streamline efficiency of the course within stipulated time frame. This enable company to operate smoothly and more productively.
  4. Creates more profit and improves customer satisfaction
    By investing in QA, we build business in terms of quality and trust. A high-quality and well-tested software attracts customers, which not only brings satisfaction but also increased profitability. There is nothing worse than angry customers, therefore don’t test their patience with an elearning course filled with bugs. Always give them quality and they will reward you with loyalty. After all, happier and satisfied customers generate more sales, high profit and new leads (references).

So, these were some of the reasons to manifest how Quality Assurance (QA) is important to run business successfully. Initially, QA is seen as an additional and unnecessary cost, but only a deeper understanding makes it clear how important it is. Maintaining high quality is very challenging for both testers and developers, but gives long term benefits and good relationship with the clients.

The Quality Assurance Checklist

QA is not just about proofreading but also ensuring that all the instructional content, typography, visual content, navigation, interactivities, quizzes and, assessments are properly arranged in the correct sequence without any technical errors. In order to simplify things, here is a checklists that needs to be kept in mind while doing eLearning quality assurance (QA).

  1. Consistent Course Content
    The eLearning course content needs to be concise, relevant, consistent and, well thought-out. It should not be too complicated, as learners do not prefer to read too much when they learn in self-paced manner. Therefore, check the content, such that it is structured and chunked logically to make learner feel engaged with the course. Also, it is necessary to take extra efforts to make difficult concepts, easy to understand and retain.
  2. Interactivity:
    In order to keep learners engaged, check the nature of interactivities in the course. There should be adequate amounts of interactivities in the course such as drag and drop, branched scenarios, assessments and quizzes, dial interactions, matching the correct options, etc. These interactivities make a world of difference and encourage factual and conceptual learning for a variety of learners.
    Therefore thoroughly check for functionality of each interactivity so that they meet the learning needs.
  3. Visual Design:
    Visual designs have a great impact on eLearning courses. This create ease in learning process and minimizes cognitive overload. “Look and Feel” aspect of a course enhances learning and allow learners to perceive best of knowledge, information, readability and usability from it. It is an integral part for a successful course creation process.
    Therefore, while testing, you should pay attention on the use of font, space, graphic, colour, video and multimedia. This activates all the sensory channels of learner, making it easier for them to understand concepts with ease and in an effective way.
  4. Interface Functionality Check
    Interface functionality is crucial for smooth learning experience. Check the following interface elements to ensure proper functioning:

    • Functionality of the interface buttons (like Next, Previous, Help, Exit…)
    • Progress bar
    • Navigation of the Menu
    • Page navigation restrictions
    • Audio overlaps in pop-ups
    • Tick marks in menu
  5. Technology Support:
    ELearning delivery should be created intelligently keeping in mind the needs of the learners as well as available technology. Be it mobile learning or any other device, you should check for the technical requirements as per the client’s needs.

Conclusion

Quality Assurance (QA) is one of the final step and most important phase in the eLearning development to deliver a high-quality, error-free and well-performed courses. If you are looking for a Quality Assurance partner who will work towards your own business goals in order to give you the best results, then Swift is the best choice. We offer dedicated QA team who work constantly using best methodologies to ensure highly functional software. And we take pride in our knowledgeable and experienced Quality Assurance Department. For further queries, get in touch with us.

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