Ensure Your Online Course Content Is Attainable

When a student is ready to do some work for their online course, it can be frustrating to find that a link is broken or a file cannot be opened. This can cause a delay in their progress, and can also cause frustration on your end. The thought of checking all pages, files, and links in an online course can be overwhelming, however.

What are Some Ways your Online Course can be Designed to meet this Standard?

• Before the course begins, use the Validate Links in Content tool within Webcourses@UCF. This tool automatically checks all of the external links in your course and will flag potentially invalid or unreachable links. Navigate to the source to fix the link. It is common for a news story or video to move to another page or website, so it may require a brief web search to find the content again.
• Check to see if any of your content requires students to have access to a technology that is proprietary. If so, list that information in your syllabus as a required resource. UCF Apps also offers a suite of tools that students can freely access, such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, among others.
• Note that Adobe Flash will no longer be supported. If you have any files that have the extension of .swf, they will need to be replaced. Read about Sunsetting Flash.
• Ask another person to navigate through your course and click around. A teaching assistant, a colleague, or even a family member may agree to this.

What Does This Look like in a Real Online Course?

Example 1: Validate Links in Content report

Example 2: Remove the invalid link on a page by highlighting the link and selecting Remove Link in the toolbar while in Edit mode

Example 3. Replace the invalid link with a valid one by highlighting the link and selecting Link to URL in the toolbar while in Edit mode