Course Engagement Checklist

Questions answered by this guide

• ?What should I check for course engagement before publishing?
• ?How much text on a slide is too much?
• ?How do I know if an interaction is purposeful or just decorative?
• ?Is there a checklist for engagement separate from accessibility?

What you'll learn

• 10 checks covering density, reading level, pacing, and interaction purpose
• A companion to the Course Engagement Guide, this is the fast, run-it-before-publishing version
• These checks are advisory judgment calls, not automatic pass/fail rules, use your own knowledge of the audience alongside them

What's inside

Instructional designers doing a final engagement pass before publishing

1. 01Content density & pacing
2. 02Reading level
3. 03Interaction purpose
4. 04Final pass

Why it matters

A course can be fully accessible and free of quality issues and still lose learners because it's dense, mismatched to their reading level, or full of interactions that don't add anything. This checklist is the fast pass for whether a finished course is actually easy to learn from.

Best practices

• Run this checklist by reading the course as your actual intended audience would, not as the subject matter expert who wrote it.
• Read dense slides out loud against their actual narration timing, if you can't keep up, a learner can't either.
• For every interaction, ask what a learner would lose by having it removed. If the honest answer is nothing, reconsider it.
• Use A11yCheck's Course Engagement findings as a starting prompt, not a verdict, they're advisory and meant to focus a human review, not replace it.

Common mistakes

• Writing at the reading level of the subject matter expert who supplied the content, instead of the actual learner audience.
• Adding a click-to-reveal or similar interaction purely to break up a slide visually, with no real content behind the click.
• Judging density by how the slide looks in the editor rather than by how much time a learner actually has to read it.

Practical checklist

• No single slide has more text than a learner can comfortably read in its given screen or narration time.
• Long paragraphs are broken into shorter sections, bullets, or multiple slides.
• Reading level matches the actual intended audience, not the subject matter expert's own writing level.
• Every interaction (click-to-reveal, tabs, drag-and-drop, etc.) changes what the learner understands or does, not just how the slide looks.
• Knowledge checks and quizzes are placed where they reinforce content just covered, not randomly.
• Slide pacing matches the complexity of its content, a dense topic isn't rushed to match a simple one's timing.
• Media (video, audio, animation) is varied enough that the whole course doesn't rely on one format throughout.
• A learner unfamiliar with the topic was asked to read through the course and flag anything confusing or slow.
• Headings are used to break up any slide with more than a couple of distinct ideas.
• The course was read start to finish in one sitting to check overall pacing, not just slide by slide.

Frequently asked questions

Summary

A focused, 10-check pass for whether a course is actually easy to learn from, content density, reading level, and interactions that serve a real purpose, distinct from accessibility and course quality.