The following is a checklist that should be reviewed before the initial release of a Coursera session based course. Assuming the course is fully developed, this list covers the most common preventable issues encountered during the first offering of a course. As you work through these issues, start by looking for completion in student view, where most of these issues can be identified. If at any point you find anything amiss, you can take a closer look in admin view with the tips given below.

Setup and appearance

1. Ensure that the course looks as welcoming and understandable as possible. Try to approach the site with the eyes of a first-time Coursera student. Is there a clear organization or flow to the course structure?

2. The left-hand student navigation bar includes all of the links students will need and nothing extra. Depending on the content of your class, you would want to remove or change several of the default links. As a minimum, ensure that the following tabs exist and link to the right places. Of course, feel free to name as desired:

• Home (Announcements)
• Video Lectures
• Quizzes
• Discussion Forums
• Syllabus

If you’re linking to other course pages, please check to make sure that they appear correctly in your browser and are up to date.

3. The title of the course and instructors’ name(s) appear correctly in the top banner.

4. The home page announcement is filled with a welcoming, guiding message and the default welcome announcement to instructors has been removed. In addition, make sure that an email announcement heralding the course is queued to release when the switch is flipped. You can do this ahead of time (i.e. set an automated send date and then flip the switch just before that time).

5. The upcoming items display, on the home page, is set up correctly.

Lecture videos

 

1. The first two weeks of lectures are viewable and downloadable. Be sure to sample clips of several videos. Also, verify that all test/demo lectures are removed.

If you cannot see a lecture listing for a video, check that the video has been uploaded and published in Section Manager.

If the video is shown in the listings but won’t play, it has most likely not been recoded. You can also check the recoding/subtitling status of all videos, published and unpublished, at a glance under “Content -> Video Status” in the admin panel. The columns “MP4” and “WebM” will show “OK (N)” if the video has been successfully recoded.

2. All videos have correct subtitles. This can be done by turning on subtitles (hotkey “c”) while viewing the video, or downloading the subtitles listed to the right of the lecture title.

• Remember that lecture videos should be uploaded early, since it takes 2+ business days for our subtitling provider to generate the subtitles in your course’s native language. If more than two business days have elapsed since submitting subtitles, or the course begins in less than two business days, please contact Course Operations.
• If the subtitles are present but unsatisfactory, see the section on “Re-subtitling videos” from “How subtitling works”.

3. In-video quizzes are set correctly.

If your in-video quizzes have been entered but do not appear at all, see our common troubleshooting tips.

4. Check that lecture resources (e.g. slides) are uploaded and linked correctly.

Assessments

Quizzes

In student view, check that all published quizzes are visible to students, and any test/demo quizzes are removed. If a quiz does not appear in the correct student module, check the “Quiz Type.” Next, check each quiz in admin view for the following:

• Open time and deadlines are correct.
• Settings such as Quiz Type, Duration, Retry Delay, and Maximum Submissions are consistent with the advertised grading policy. Please refer to Editing quiz settings for more guidelines.
• All questions are visible in Preview. If one is not visible, check that the question has a nonzero number of variations set to display.

Peer Assessments

In student view, check that the course page at the top of peer grading student page has been modified so that guidelines for instructors have been removed, and any necessary additional instructions have been added. Also ensure that desired assignments appear in student view, and test/demo or later assignments don’t appear. Next, check following under the Peer Grading tab in admin view. For each assignment, check “Visual Edit,” and scroll to the bottom, where you can get a preview of both Submission and Evaluation phases. Besides errors in content, verify that:

• Every peer assessment has at least one question. Otherwise, students will have no space to write their answer.
• Every evaluation criterion has some text written in the text box; otherwise, it won’t show up.
• All settings are correct, such as open times, evaluation deadlines, and number of evaluators.

Programming Assignments

In student view, check that all parts of the assignment are displayed properly, and the one-time password (if applicable) is shown. In order to truly be assured that the assignment is ready to go, a few sample submissions should be made. If the assignment hasn’t yet been published, you’ll need to append “-dev” to the assignment part ID. Check that:

1. The submission script correctly connects to the server.

2. Several correct answers are graded as correct; several incorrect answers are graded as incorrect. Customer service software powered by Desk.com

3. The most recent version of the assignment has been published. Some fields in the “Edit part” are known to not correctly update the status of the assignment in

4. The corresponding scores are correctly associated with the account used for testing.

5. If you are using a grading script, ensure that it is running stably on the external server.

Forums

1. The structure is reasonably arrayed, and all forums allow student posting (unless otherwise desired). Note that some instructors prefer to create sub-forums partitioned by learning units, which may help focus discussion.

Class settings and policies

 

Even when a course is not eligible for transfer credit, or is not enabled for Signature Track, students care a great deal about their scores. In order to assure few hiccups, check that:

1. There is a syllabus which details the grading policy, and allows students to know exactly what they have to do in order to earn a Statement of Accomplishment or Verified Certificate. Be sure that the grading policy is supported by our platform by checking our documentation on Calculating overall course grades and by contacting Course Operations.

2. The course-wide grading policy settings are consistent with the syllabus. In admin view, check under the Grading Policy tab in admin that a reasonable amount of late days are given, and late penalties are within reasoning, considering the audience. Most essentially, confirm that the appropriate “quiz policy” is selected. Instructors most commonly select “Maximum Score Grading Policy” to give students an incentive to attempt quizzes multiple times, but all are valid.

3. (from above) Individual quiz settings also reflect the expectations laid out in the syllabus.