QUALITY ASSURANCE PROCESS
Role: Designer, Project Manager
Tools: Articulate Rise, Microsoft Excel, Canvas
Process: I was tasked with creating a systematic process for reviewing and editing course content for our school. We were experiencing rapid student growth and the administration wanted to ensure our courses were error-free before copying the content into teacher sections. Errors in the master course that copied out to live courses could become very time-intensive to fix.
I partnered with our lead course editor to begin developing the quality assurance process. We reached out to a colleague from a previous office to get her insight and resources her team used to edit courses for the university as a starting point for our process. However, with a vastly different business model and a different LMS, it was up to us to translate the editing practices and principles into our context.
We interviewed a number of faculty and staff members to find out what common errors they saw and what issues students reported. As we began collecting feedback it became clear that the school did not need a copy editing process; we needed a comprehensive quality assurance process and a clear set of course design standards and conventions. The content was not of poor quality, but the style, standards, and practices for each content department (math, history, science, etc.) varied greatly. A written standard, with systematic enforcement by a team within the school, was the right solution.
After months of designing and testing a pilot process, we were ready to implement the quality assurance process on our first course. After the first full edit, we made some adjustments to the review process and began training the other editors. Further refinements came over the next month. The process still gets tweaked occasionally as Canvas, Articulate, and other technologies update their products, or as school initiatives evolve.