Course Review Tracking Template

How do you track revision comments in your e-learning or online courses? Here’s a spreadsheet template you can use.

How do you track revision comments in your e-learning or online courses? Most of the time, I use a spreadsheet based on the revision tracking template below.

Review Tracking Template
My spreadsheet includes a formula to automatically add the page title once reviewers enter the module and page number. That makes it easier for reviewers. However, if I don’t have visible page numbers (either directly on the slide or in a table of contents), I remove the formula and ask reviewers to type the page title or description.

Depending on your reviewers, you may want to protect the sheet and lock down the page title column to keep them from overwriting the formula. If you use continuous numbering throughout the course, you can also probably use a simpler formula than this template.

The spreadsheet has three hidden columns. I keep these hidden when I initially send it to reviewers so they can focus on just their part. After I have gotten the feedback, I make the columns visible to add my comments and questions.

I use Google Docs when I can for reviews because multiple reviewers can all see each others comments. They can avoid duplicating feedback. Everything is all in one file and doesn’t need combining later. However, if Google Docs isn’t allowed in an organization or it’s important to get independent feedback from each reviewer, I use Excel instead.
Feel free to copy this spreadsheet and adapt it for your own use. You can also download it for Excel.

How do you track feedback on your courses? Do you use a spreadsheet like this, or do you use a custom-built tool like ReviewMyElearning or OQAR? If you have your own cool spreadsheet, I’d love to see it. I’m constantly tweaking this form to improve it, and I might learn something from your version.
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23 thoughts on “Course Review Tracking Template

  1. I am looking for a learning system for building our college course section containing the features like Tracking students performance, assessment, etc. Can anyone help me with resources? I am struggling to find those resources.

    1. ShoutMeBack, what you’re looking for is called a “learning management system.” I have a separate post with resources to help you figure out what LMS is the best fit. For a college, you could probably start with looking at Canvas, since that’s a very popular system in higher ed. Use Capterra or other tools to compare features between Canvas and other LMSs to refine your search further.

      https://www.christytuckerlearning.com/i-need-an-lms-where-do-i-start/

  2. Thank Cristy, I just discovered this resource as plan to use this template to create or implement a curation spreadsheet for our eLearning modules.

  3. Hey Christy,
    Thanks for pointing it out. We’re still in beta and with all our hectic schedules, the FAQ has not been updated for a while. We’ll do it asap.
    In the meantime, why don’t you give zipBoard a try and let us know what we can improve upon? It would be much appreciated. 🙂 It is my sincere hope that you find it a much more complete and easier-to-use reviewing solution than the ones you mentioned.

    1. No, Bhavya, I’m not going to spend time providing free QA for your company. It doesn’t appear you did any market research to identify your competitors or to see what real problems are faced by your target audience. Your tool doesn’t actuality solve a problem for me; it would create new ones of browser compatibility and training clients to annotate. Even if you get out of beta eventually, it’s not a product I see myself using.

  4. Yes, I understand Christy. We know supporting chrome only is a limitation, but we are working on rolling out the same for firefox as well. But overall we wanted to test it out on one browser first. The workflow is such that the whole review + QA process + project management can be handled in one tool. And there is visual review, which is something not supported by any other tool (which is the main reason for the chrome browser as well )

      1. Hey Christy,
        Both ReviewmyElearning and OQAR only allow comments for the whole slide without being able to annotate over a particular portion of the slide. Also, if there are multiple interactions within the same slide they cannot be captured. zipBoard lets you add annotations over every interaction within the same slide. I would be glad to walk you through the product. You can find more details by viewing the video here as well: http://www.zipboard.co/faq.php#howTo

        1. Ok, you mean drawing on the slide. “Visual review” doesn’t actually communicate that. That’s a nice perk, but it doesn’t cancel out the fact that I couldn’t use it with the majority of my clients. I understand why you went with Chrome only for an MVP to pilot, but your product really isn’t ready for use in the real world of elearning yet.

        2. By the way, your FAQ also makes the false claim that “You can review your SCORM (HTML5) courses in zipBoard. Currently, no mechanism exists to review an elearning SCORM course during production.” ReviewMyElearning and OQAR also allow reviews of SCORM courses. When you need to lie in your documentation and pretend you have no competitors, it doesn’t make you seem like a very trustworthy company.

  5. Hi Christy,
    This is a great post! To create engaging online courses, it is important to be able to review them collaboratively. With that thought , we created zipBoard (www.zipBoard/eLearning). It is a tool for all stakeholders to visually collaborate on SCORM/html courses. That means no more lengthy email exchanges, rather a common place to track and assign tasks in a course.
    Please do check it out, and let us know, what you think about the review process adapted by zipBoard.
    Thanks,
    Bhavya
    http://elearningindustry.com/zipboard-simplify-elearning-content-development-visual-feedback

    1. Many of my clients have restrictions about what browsers they can use in their workplaces. A Chrome-only tool isn’t really a viable solution for consultants like me who work with multiple clients. I can see how it might work for internal teams in companies where Chrome is installed on all computers by default.

    1. I don’t have any that I really feel are terrific. I usually use some generic template and add my own tasks. You can find templates online for Excel and Google Docs, including ones that allow you to create a Gantt chart. Some of those build the chart automatically; some require you to manually change the color of cells.
      If I don’t use a template, I use a simple task list spreadsheet (task, person responsible, goal start date, goal end date, actual start, actual end). I’m a one-person company, so a simple spreadsheet is often enough for me.
      There’s a free book on project management for instructional design. It’s on my (long!) list of books to read, but you might see if it includes any templates.
      http://pm4id.org/

  6. Christy,
    This could not have come at a better time for me. Thank you for this and all of your other posts.
    Liz

  7. I used to do the same thing and would put it on Google Drive so everyone could use it at the same time and it was more collaborative. Recently, we moved to using Review My eLearning, http://www.reviewmyelearning.com while there is a cost it is soooo worth it because it reduces our time to do edits tremendously.

    1. I tried to use ReviewMyElearning maybe a year ago and it was an epic failure with Captivate 8. I couldn’t ask my clients to spend so much time troubleshooting, so we went back to the standby spreadsheet. Customer support said they would work on the compatibility problems. I haven’t tried it yet though.
      I also have clients who are reviewing courses in Moodle rather than just standalone e-learning files. The spreadsheet works best for that.
      I really wanted to like ReviewMyElearning though. Maybe it’s time to test it out again. Do you use Captivate, Storyline, or something else? Have you had any compatibility or cross browser issues with reviews?

      1. Christy, I started using it about 6 months ago and have been really pleased. I am developing 90% of the time in Storyline so it seems to work well. I did have to change some publishing settings to make sure that it displayed properly in RME.

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