Online learning now becomes an integral part of teaching and training for many learners as its time-freedom and cost-efficiency. Many online learning providers emerge. In such competitive online learning landscape, learners have more options and higher expectations for online learning than ever before. Ensuring the quality of online learning is critical. Simply having an online program is no longer good enough, if it ever was. As an online learning provider, what are you doing to ensure the quality of online courses and programs?

Make full use of data to ensure the quality of online learning and improve online learning effects. Do a good job on the data collecting and analyzing. Then, what data are so important to collect and analyze? How to collect these data? Take surveys to collect the course information from learners and organize exams to test the extent of knowledge learners grasp. And then analyze these data and improve your online courses according to the analysis results.

How to get these useful data?

• Doing a survey Surveys are one of the most common tools for gathering evaluation data. Doing a survey is a good way of gathering evaluation data. Design surveys that provide valuable information for you.
  
1. Remind learners to preview courses and invite learners to take a survey before class. In connection with the content of online course, take advice of learners about which point needs to be present or elaborate in the online course. Collect and sum up the data, and emphasize the specified points in the course.
2. Insert a survey at the end of course and ask learners to take it. You can make a survey to collect the information about how they feel about the course, are there any content they don't understand, let them write down there questions. Then, you can record their questions and explain the specified questions in the beginning of next course.
To learn more about how to make effective surveys, here are some tips for you.

• Taking a test Test the understanding of learners after learners finished the course. This will be a most effective way to get useful information from learners about the quality of the course. You can organize a formal test, ask learners' name and then publish the test results. But I don't think this is a good idea. Many learners will take much attention to the grade, and they will be cheating for decent higher scores. That will not be your goal, I think. What you need is the true data from learners in order to use these data to increase the quality of online learning. So, anonymous testing way is strongly recommended.

What tools can help you do this work?
For collecting data for online course learners, online tools are necessary. All the online survey making and online test making work can be done by online quiz makers. Via search from Google, you will get some free online ones (such as proprofs quiz) and quiz maker shareware (like QuizCreator). Free ones may not do a good job at result data collecting. So, just use quiz maker software to help you do the data collection and analysis work. QuizCreator can help uses make interactive quizzes or surveys, it also supply online results management system for users. If you want to host the results management system on your serve, just use the standalone results tracking systems .

Improvement should be an ongoing process, not an event to be endured. So, in order to make success in online learning, please don't wait for the end of each course (when it's too late to improve that course) to make improvements. Collect useful data from learners, do analysis in depth, and implement in your online courses to improve the quality of online learning.