Using Articulate 360 Review for your eLearning Modules
One of the things that I have always found challenging, ever since I started working in the eLearning field, is to gather feedback for an eLearning module. I have seen different ways in which this feedback is provided to the programmers by the client, like an Excel spreadsheet, Word documents, even long emails detailing all the changes.
Ultimately, what’s important for the programmer is to receive clear instructions as to what the issue is and how it needs to be solved, or how the feature in the eLearning module needs to be modified, and technically that can be achieved using the different media described above, however, there are two things that become challenging when using those:
Tracking the changes that have been done
Identifying exactly where in the eLearning module are the changes to be done
Thankfully for us programmers and also for our clients, Articulate released with its 360 software, a platform to help us with these two challenges, and even adding a few more features to make our lives easier during the review cycle of our eLearning modules.
So, how do we make use of this feature in Articulate 360 (More specifically, Storyline)? Well, first things first: you must have an active subscription for the Articulate 360 software, that’ll give you instant access to the Articulate 360 Review platform.
The next step is to publish your eLearning module once you think it’s appropriate (in our case, usually when it is fully programmed), but publish it to Articulate 360:
When you select this option in the Publish popup, you will then see two options:
Create a new item: Select this if this is the first time you publish the module to Articulate 360, or if you want to create a fresh link without previous comments.
Publish a new version of an existing item: If this is a new iteration of the eLearning module, select this to create a new version, preserving the same review URL and previous comments.
The cool part of the second option is that you or the reviewer can compare the current version of the eLearning module to previous versions, to see the evolution, only by selecting it from the dropdown menu in the review window:
Once you publish it, Articulate 360 will automatically generate a URL that you can share with the reviewers so they can go through the eLearning module and add their comments. Keep in mind that it’s not necessary the reviewers have an 360 account, they will only be asked to input their email address when they click for the first time in the comments section:
Entering the email address severs two purposes: Identify the person adding the comment, and notify them when some one replies to their comments. That is right, replies, another nice feature in this platform.
Either another reviewer or a programmer can reply to other comments, to expand upon the issue or to explain what was done to solve it. The comments can also be marked as ‘Resolved’, they will be removed from the panel, but you can bring them back by selecting the “Show resolved comments” from the “More options” menu:
You can also see in he menu bar, that you can change the view from Review to Feedback. The Review option, shows the eLearning module in the window so that you can go through it, but also has a Comments panel to the right, so you can read and/or add comments for any particular screen. When you change back to the Feedback view, you will the priority is given to the comments, however, each comment is accompanied by a screenshot of the screen in which it was added, so that you can easily identify where the issue is taking place. This is specially helpful, since it’s always a challenge to point out where the change needs to happen, some clients will include screenshots when they send back their review forms, some will not but will add a number, some will use the slide title, but this can (and has) cause confusion.
If you want to learn more about feedback and review techniques for your eLearning modules, visit us at www.pathwaystrainingandelearning.com and leave us a message, or call as at 1.888.961.6011 ext. 121.
