eLearn Magazine has just published this In Depth Tutorial by Michael Feldstein and Lisa Neal.
"This guide was primarily designed to help teams of instructional designers and content experts create effective, self-paced e-learning. It teaches best practices for improving usability that can be applied by any instructional designers or content experts and was created so that no prior knowledge of usability is required to use the techniques."
Some readers will like the article's emphasis on "hueristic usability testing" (that is when one or more evaluators systematically inspect online materials and judge their compliance with recognized usability principles).
I particularly support Michael and Lisa's reference to the value of choosing some personas of potential learners before you start, with a view to ensuring that the course will make sense to, and be usable by, all of them; and this is something that is written into the publicly available, wiki-based, TUC Online Course Development and Management Manual.
Readers who find this whole area of interest may be able to make use of Supporting eLearners [150 kB PDF]. I wrote this last year with David Jennings to show the practical application of the British Standards Institution's BS 8426 A code of practice for e-support in e-learning systems. The handout, upon which feedback is welcome, contains an overview of the standard, details of how it has been applied to some specific courses, and some discussion questions.
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