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Collaborative eLearning Development to
Take the Pain Out of SME Reviews

If the thought of reviewing online courses makes you groan, you’re not alone! Most hands-on classroom trainers and SMEs find it tedious to review storyboards and courses.
Collaborative eLearning Development to Take the Pain Out of SME Reviews

Before the entry of online review tools into the eLearning world, reviewing a storyboard meant capturing feedback in a PPT, Word doc, or Excel sheet. 

And there were many problems with that.

  • With multiple SMEs, there were multiple feedback documents to keep track of.
  • There could be contradictory feedback from different reviewers.
  • And for SMEs who were not comfortable with working on the PPT format, a storyboard review would probably mean:
    • Taking printouts of the PPT storyboard
    • Adding comments (with a pen) to the hard copy (often difficult to decipher)
    • Sending the scanned copies to the development team

Customer Story

We had to try something different for one of our clients, an engineering equipment manufacturer – for a product sales training for their sales reps – because: 

  • The content was highly technical and complex
  • Each course had 2-4 SMEs to sign off on content
  • The timelines were very tight with low availability of SMEs
  • With multiple reviewers, consolidation of feedback could be a problem

We came up with a customer-oriented, streamlined 4-step process that took the pain out of SME reviews.

How? By using ONLINE REVIEWS!

The new streamlined process looks like this:

The new streamlined process
The new streamlined process

Advantages of Online Reviews

Online Access – Convenient anytime, anywhere access.
  • No need to download heavy files onto your laptop
  • Especially useful to access the course from a mobile device
Simultaneous Reviews by Multiple SMES – You and your colleagues can now simultaneously review the same course. This means that you can:
  • Read each other’s comments
  • Resolve contradictions if required
  • Provide cohesive feedback, saving a lot of time
Ease of Use – With the intuitive interface of the reviewing tool, online reviews are much easier to use than reviews in most other formats, including Word and PPT.
Version Control No Longer a Nightmare – No more multiple standalone versions of the feedback documents going back and forth between fellow reviewers or between the reviewers and developers.

Tools for Online reviews

We use two tools for online reviews – Lectora ReviewLink and Articulate Storyline Review.

Lectora ReviewLink can be used to review courses developed with any authoring tool, whereas Articulate’s Storyline Review can only be used for courses developed in Articulate.

Whatever your choice of reviewing tool, it makes reviews a lot easier than ever before!

Here's how you can use Lectora ReviewLink

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