Creating an online course is a difficult task.
You worked on it for months, tweak it, improve it to make sure you are providing utmost value to your students.
But, after you publish your course, you don’t evaluate it further!. This is a big mistake.
You think that you’ve created a great course, but how do you know that students will like your
course if you don’t evaluate it? They might not enjoy your course that much as you thought they would.
That’s why you need to conduct an online course evaluation process to judge its performance.
Now, the question is, how do you evaluate your online course? Your students are from different parts of the country and assessing your online course among these remote students can be tricky.
But here is a basic structure that you can apply to assess your online course.
- Think about the learners’ perspective.
- Offer realistic and definite goals.
- Provide an interactive experience.
- Provide actionable and valuable course
- Always be available to answer questions.
- Create surveys to get feedback.
With this above-mentioned process, you can get a better idea of your course and what you need to do to improve it.
1. Think about learners prospective
The first step in assessing your online course is understanding your audience, i.e. students. You may find it difficult to do because of the false consensus effect.
You think that your students can learn at the same pace as you are teaching. But that is not true.
You need to keep yourself in your student’s shoes and build your course from the ground up.
This way you can understand what problems your students are facing. This will help you improve your course content.
2. Offer realistic and definite goal
You don’t want to give your students false information. Let your students know upfront, what they are signing up for,
what are the things you will teach them, and how much time would take them to complete the course and learn.
This way, students and teachers both can be on the same page and students will know exactly what they
can expect from your course. And they will be more prepared to learn from your course.
3. Provide an Interactive Experience
Humans don't have a good attention span. If you only create your course based on “rote” learning, that can be a huge turn off for most of the students.
They will get bored and simply forget everything that has been taught in the course.
To get the best results from students you need to design your course with interactive quizzes or some sort of activities.
This can be forums, online chat rooms, communities, group activities, etc.
4. Provide Actionable & Valuable Content
We already talked that “rote” learning is not a good strategy to teach students in online courses. If your content only touches the theoretical aspect of a subject,
it will not generate much interest in the student's mind. That’s why you need to ask yourself these questions first,
- Why are you making a particular course?
- Why are you choosing this subject?
- How can students implement this information?
Make sure your course is actionable enough that your students can apply learnings on their own.
5. Always be available to answer questions
As a course creator and teacher, you will get a lot of questions from your students.
Be sure to reply to these questions promptly. It will create trust between you and your students and your students will be more willing to learn from you.
You also need to keep track of the questions that students are asking frequently. If you get some common questions frequently, it’s a sign that your course
does not cover some concepts clearly and you need to redo some of the parts to make your course content more valuable.
6. Create surveys to evaluate your course
You can not create better course content unless you know what aspects you did good and in what part of the course fell short.
That is why you need to create a small survey and share it with your students at the end of their course.
Most of the students are happy to share their views and opinion on the video course.
The questions may vary depending on the course content and type but your goal should be to get
a good idea where your course was successful and where it fell short.
Wrapping Up
The process of assessing online course content should not be hard. It just needs a little bit of effort from your end.
If you work on improving the course with the help of continuous feedback from the students,
your course quality will improve and students will get immense benefit from your course.