INSTANT User Feedback For Elearning Courses Now Possible

By: Justin Ferriman April 29, 2013
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Getting real-time feedback from users who are taking an elearning course has been a difficult task. Traditionally, these elearning packages launch in a new window and the user is “stuck” taking the course with little to no ability to ask questions during the course. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to know exactly where in a course it was that a user was confused? We are getting closer to achieving this, and this nifty tool is one way to help.

The program is called BugMuncher, and it was originally built to provide feedback and comments on parts of a website that aren’t working. What’s cool is that it lets you highlight the issue on the screen and then provide feedback. This information is then sent to the administrator who receives the comments and also a screenshot of the highlighted areas.

Are you starting to see where the possibilities are with this?

bugmuncherThere is nothing stopping an organization from hosting this program on their LMS in an effort to capture feedback from users as they take the course. The second that a user has a question, they can highlight the part of the course that is confusing, type their question, and send it – all while maintaining the flow of the course (and better yet, without having to pull-up a separate email program in order to type a random email and insert a bunch of screenshots).

You could also use this program for reviewing your elearning courses before they are launched, which provides a great way for reviewers to communicate mistakes in content or visuals with relevant, detailed screenshots.

Although BugMuncher wasn’t built specifically for this purpose, I see tremendous opportunity in using it in this way. It solves the tedious review cycle problem (emails with hard to view screenshots), and also enables real-time feedback mechanism from users taking elearning courses – something that has been missing for quite some time. If you’re curious about the program, go to the BugMuncher website and test it out. There’s no need to sign-up either as they have it installed on their own website. Perhaps you’ll think of other applicable ways this can be used.

From a LearnDash perspective, you can also gather feedback from your participants by leveraging the comment functionality in WordPress.  It’s a great way for users to ask questions in real time and to reference the material that they are currently viewing.  It also gives you the ability to answer questions publicly for the benefit of all your users.

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter