What is a technical check?

When one of our team begins to check your site you will receive an email asking you not to make any further changes. Our check is focussed on usability and clarity for students, and we enter the site as student when we do the check.

We check the following:

• That the copyright notice and disclaimers are on the homepage and are up-to-date
• That all the links in the site, both to the documents you have uploaded into the site and to external sites, go where they’re supposed to
• That there aren’t any blank pages (these tend to make students anxious – if a page will have material added to it later then please put a note to that effect on it in the meantime)
• That any dated documents in the site have been updated for the current students (eg course outline with deadlines in it)
• That the dates for timed tasks such as quizzes have been updated for the current enrolment
• That all pages are displaying correctly in several browsers on both Mac and PC platforms
• That the structure of the site isn’t confusing and, especially if the course is fully online, that students will be able to follow it when they log in
• That copyright material is properly presented or acknowledged (see information about putting images or links to copyright text material into your course
• That there are no really big files, such as powerpoint presentations, that students will have trouble downloading (see some options for the presentation of these files above)
• That the discussion forum (if you’ve used one) has a welcome message in it
• That the Course Menu has been updated (easy to overlook!)

We don’t check the following:

• Content, links or anything else in sites outside the University LMS (CE6)
• Content of documents in the site in any detail – although we might run our eye over them to check for live links we wouldn’t for instance proofread them or check their spelling

As a result of what we find we might do a little work, say, on an html document that wasn’t displaying correctly and can be easily fixed. We might also hide an occasional broken link on the understanding that you will fix it as soon as possible. Any work we do will be explained to you, and in most cases checked with you before we do it. However, we don’t have the time to fix a site that needs a lot of work. In such cases we will write to you detailing what needs to be done. Your site will not be able to move through the process until these things have been fixed.

Once the site has passed the Applicaion to Activate (A2A) you will receive an email telling you that it has been moved into the queue for activation. The bulk movement of sites to the live server, or migrations as we call them, are usually only done once a day, so you will usually receive notice of activation a day or two later.