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Software Goes Through Beta Testing. Should Online College Courses? (edsurge.com)
"Testing online courses is not standard practice at traditional colleges," points out a new article at EdSurge -- though beta-testing is part of the process for other online learning sites. jyosim summarizes their report:
Coursera has recruited a volunteer corp of more than 2,500 beta testers to try out MOOCs before they launch. Other free online course providers have set up systems that catch things like mistakes in tests, or just whether videos are confusing. Traditional colleges have shied away from checking online course content before going live, citing academic freedom. But some colleges are developing checklists to judge course design and accessibility.
"It would be lovely if universities would consider ways of adopting the practice of beta testing," says Phillip Long, chief innovation officer and associate vice provost for learning sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. One factor, though, is cost. "How do you scale that at a university that has thousands of courses being taught," he asks... How much beta testing makes sense for courses, and what's the best way to do it?
A senior instructional designer at the State University of New York says "On most campuses, instructional designers have their hands full and don't have time to review the courses before they go live... We're still trying to find the magic bullet that motivates people to review other people's courses when they're not being paid."
"It would be lovely if universities would consider ways of adopting the practice of beta testing," says Phillip Long, chief innovation officer and associate vice provost for learning sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. One factor, though, is cost. "How do you scale that at a university that has thousands of courses being taught," he asks... How much beta testing makes sense for courses, and what's the best way to do it?
A senior instructional designer at the State University of New York says "On most campuses, instructional designers have their hands full and don't have time to review the courses before they go live... We're still trying to find the magic bullet that motivates people to review other people's courses when they're not being paid."
I am posting as AC for -reasons- (not sure what all is NDA, etc)
But Coursera courses go through a beta test before they are launched. I'm not sure how many 'learners'(they don't call them students) go through it, or if it is just Coursera Staff... but there -are- _some_ people who go through the course(s) early.
Their new platform sucks IMHO. It is difficult for Instructors to actually produce meaningful content since their platform is 24/7 on-demand only now and new course sections start every 2 weeks. So it is impossible for a lot of good academic practices because of the platform design.
Can no longer: release an assignment, set a due date, have it submitted by that date, release the answers, do peer review based off the answers, and then have the peer-review be a mechanism by which 'learners' not only see the 'right' answers, but also are required to evaluate others' answers.The reason for this is that the platform requires that the -same- assignment be released again in 2 weeks, so no way of ever releasing answers publicly. And there is no way to produce _quality_ assignments for every assignment for every course every 2 weeks (unless that is all you are doing & we have University Classes, etc. still)... And that still ignores possible updates to course material, planning new courses, etc...
This is very serious when it comes to [redacted] assignments like I like to produce for my courses... I've also heard that it is even a bigger issue when it comes to Computer Science, Engineering, or Maths classes because they can only ever tell you what are 'wrong' answers (due to auto-grading) but never tell you the RIGHT answers...