Every day at zipBoard, I brainstorm and assist customers from many sectors in understanding how to optimize their review process for marketing material, website updates, construction submittals, and eLearning courses.

To give a short introduction to the product, zipBoard is a review and collaboration tool for all types of creatives. And with images, pdfs, videos, SCORM files and live authoring tools supported, L&D professionals are one of our biggest user bases.

Being a SaaS(software as a service) marketer from an engineering background, I’ve had to learn the hard way that identifying the pain point is one side of the solution. But creating convincing resources for the potential users and processes to back it up is a completely different beast. But once you have that system in place, the picture starts to get a bit clear.

Recently, I’ve observed a pattern, particularly with eLearning courses: the evaluation process is difficult! You’ve got instructional designers, SMEs, a creative team, a project manager, developers, and a client, all of whom have jobs to complete and opinions on the project. Each of these stakeholders plays an important role in delivering and responding to input. And keeping all this information structured may be difficult. Not to mention the added difficulty of handling the numerous iterations!

Speaking with eLearning course developers, instructional designers, and project managers made me realize that we need to acknowledge the complexity of developing an eLearning course and address the typical challenges. The following are the most significant difficulties that I identified:

1. Getting the course in front of reviewers is the first step: Different authoring tools like Adobe Captivate, Gomo and Articulate 360 make it difficult to share your course with non-technical stakeholders.
2. Managing multiple iterations of the same course: Each version receives feedback from external stakeholders and team members. For the first few iterations, you’ll need your SMEs, and as the course starts to take shape, you’ll need to be able to bring in your customers.
3. Managing piles of feedback: It’s challenging to take full advantage of reviewers’ invaluable feedback without a strong feedback management system. Many stakeholders and multiple versions produce LOTS of feedback. Reviews from ‘This looks good!’ to ‘the population of India is 1.38 billion, NOT 1.38 million need to be sorted into comments and actionable tasks, tasks need to be assigned to team members and due dates need to be set to keep everything on track.

We were able to identify some strategies to reduce these challenges…

1. Give non-technical reviewers access to ONLY what they need: Don’t overwhelm them with information that is irrelevant to them, send them a direct link to the content and make sure they have the tools they need to easily leave reviews. We achieved this using the ‘require login’ toggle in our share option. Allowing guest reviewers to provide their feedback without any acc on our app.
2. Keep versions separate, but together: Huh? Let me explain…each version’s comments and reviewers should be kept separate (back to point 1, don’t give reviewers a version they don’t need to review!) BUT versions of the same course should be kept together in a project space so your internal team has easy access to all the information relevant to the course. And our users could create unlimited projects, the issue of keeping different versions of the same file was mitigated to some extent.
3. Upgrade your spreadsheet: Don’t get me wrong, I also LOVE excel but there is a time and a place, and this is not it! You need a tool that can handle loads of qualitative feedback with screenshots, due dates, and people assigned to handle it.
4. Pinpoint the error to the developer: Whether working on a web project or learning content, developers hate it the most when the feedback isn’t in context. I’ve talked with course developers who say they spend at least an hour a day trying to correlate the context of feedback from their spreadsheet, emails, chats and the authoring tool. Our solution has always been clear, use an annotation tool to pinpoint the error. It doesn’t have to be zipBoard, but just make sure your tool supports multiple file types. It’s no good changing and chopping tools.

I hope this was helpful! Let me know if there’s any particular problem that I’ve maybe missed. It’s always good to listen to new ones and brainstorm a solution.

Also, if you want to learn more, we have an upcoming webinar on these exact challenges and more on April 28th at 9 am PST. You can register here for the same. If you’re reading after the 28th, fret not. You will find a recording of the webinar on the same page.