Course Review Checklist: A Role-Based Process for Reviewing eLearning

Questions answered by this guide

• ?What's a good process for reviewing an eLearning course before it launches?
• ?Who should review a course before it publishes, and in what order?
• ?What's the difference between this and the Before You Publish Checklist?
• ?How do I catch problems before they're expensive to fix?
• ?Should the SME review before or after the accessibility review?

What you'll learn

• Four stages: self-review, SME review, accessibility/quality/engagement review, final sign-off
• Each stage has a different reviewer and a different job, reviewing everything at once at the end catches problems too late to fix cheaply
• Complements, not replaces, Before You Publish Checklist, that's the final stage's fast pass

What's inside

Instructional designers, SMEs, QA reviewers, and L&D managers coordinating a multi-person course review

1. 01Stage 1: Self-review (author)
2. 02Stage 2: SME review
3. 03Stage 3: Accessibility, quality, and engagement review
4. 04Stage 4: Final sign-off

Why it matters

A course reviewed only once, right before publishing, by one person, tends to catch surface problems and miss structural ones. A broken link is easy to catch late. A learning objective that doesn't match the actual content, or a course built around an interaction pattern that turns out not to be accessible, is expensive to catch late, it means rebuilding, not just fixing. Staging review by role means each kind of problem gets caught by the person actually equipped to catch it, at the point where fixing it is still cheap.

When you'll encounter this

• More than one person touches a course before it launches, an author, a subject matter expert, and a reviewer, not just one person building and publishing solo.
• A course has failed review late before, after most of the build work was already done.
• You're setting up a repeatable process for a team, not reviewing a single one-off course.

Example

Best practices

• Stage 1, self-review: the author reviews their own work against Before You Publish Checklist before sending it anywhere, catching the obvious things themselves costs the team nothing.
• Stage 2, SME review: a subject matter expert reviews for content accuracy, completeness, and whether the course actually teaches what it claims to, before any further polish work happens on top of it.
• Stage 3, accessibility/quality/engagement review: run once content is stable, not before, since content changes after this stage often mean re-checking. This is where a real A11yCheck scan belongs in the process, alongside a manual pass.
• Stage 4, final sign-off: a second person confirms every prior stage's issues were actually resolved, not just identified, before the course is marked ready to publish.
• Document who signed off at each stage and when, even informally, so a problem discovered later can be traced to which stage should have caught it.

Common mistakes

• Running every kind of review at the very end, in one pass, which means every kind of problem is equally expensive to fix by the time it's found.
• Skipping SME review because the person who built the course is confident in the content, confidence isn't the same as a second set of eyes.
• Treating sign-off as a formality instead of an actual re-check that prior issues were resolved.

Practical checklist

• The author has run Before You Publish Checklist against their own work first.
• A subject matter expert has reviewed content accuracy and completeness before further build work continues.
• Accessibility, course quality, and course engagement have each been reviewed, with both an automated scan and a manual pass.
• Every issue found in Stage 3 has a resolution, fixed, or a documented decision not to fix, not just a list of open items.
• A different person than the original author performs final sign-off.
• The sign-off decision and date are recorded somewhere the team can find later.

Frequently asked questions

Summary

A course reviewed once, at the end, by one person, catches surface problems and misses structural ones. Staging review across four roles, self, SME, accessibility/quality/engagement, sign-off, catches each kind of problem at the point where it's still cheap to fix.