Elearning
author Ilona Hetsevich
author 12 Oct 2011
author Hits: 3691
comments comments

A lot has been written about using JoomLMS system in education and professional training. Still nothing has been said upon the courses quality estimation. And there is a direct connection between the quality of the taken course and the information being provided correctly and up-to-date. The way the course completion tracking system is configured is also very important as well as correct quiz tasks and questions.

A lot has been written about using JoomLMS system in education and professional training. Still nothing has been said upon the courses quality estimation. And there is a direct connection between the quality of the taken course and the information being provided correctly and up-to-date. The way the course completion tracking system is configured is also very important as well as correct quiz tasks and questions.

The only reliable way to check the course quality is to ask those who have already taken it about their opinions. It’s possible to request the users who have completed the studies to submit reviews with comments and suggestions. Another variant here is to publish the comments on the site, add them to the testimonials. But lots of people are skeptical about such comments – and it’s easy to see why.

There are many available options but recently an opportunity to use jReviews plugin in JoomLMS system has been developed. This integration offers new options that were either unavailable or difficult to implement before. jReviews-JoomLMS integration provides a possibility for the users to comment and rate each taken course.

Courses can be rated based on various criteria. To rate a course it’s necessary to put points from 1 to 5 for each criteria. You can take a look at an example of course rating created with jReviews-JoomLMS plugin. We selected the following course rating criteria for this example:

  1. Overall rating
  2. Quality of information
  3. Interactivity
  4. Navigation convenience
  5. Instructors response
  6. Diversity

 

It’s possible to widen the list of criteria to provide a more flexible course rating. For example it is possible to add the following course rating criteria:

  1. Course contents complexity
  2. Course graphics
  3. Tasks diversity
  4. Up-to-date additional materials
  5. Course pages loading speed

 

It’s also possible to leave only the option to rate the whole course without specifying different criteria - that is provide an opportunity for a user to rate the whole course on a five-grade scale. This method is practiced successfully on the site of our valued customer NOEP Continuing Education (http://www.noep.org/nursing-cne). You can see the courses rating at once as well as the number of the users who took part in the rating process. The course with the set rating in the list of courses can be viewed in image 1.

rating

Image 1. A separate NOEP company course rating

If you go on to the course home page it’s possible to see a more detailed course description, check the provided comments and the criteria based on which the rating was set.

If a larger number of criteria were set for this site you could see them at the Course Home page as well and it would look approximately like in image 2.

rating_criteria

Image 2. Course rating criteria example

jReviews-JoomLMS integration allows to find materials’ and learning process development weaknesses and provides a qualitative user feedback. Due to this the quality of education is generally raised, particularly the quality of each separate course.

 

The benefits for potential course students are obvious as well. There is an opportunity to estimate the quality of the course and advisability of taking it prior to enrolling.