Quality is an important consideration for everyone involved in the acquisition or development of learning content. Most measures of quality have been developed for classroom instruction, often focusing on the ability of the instructor to get the message across to the student or to please the student. However, the proliferation of web-based training approaches requires a more direct and intentional focus on the process of developing high quality instructional content. Content acquired without quality assessment may be effective, but creates significant risk for the acquisition manager, and for the end-user who must learn from this content. For this reason, it is essential to determine what quality is and is not with respect to instructional content, and to identify and establish objective measures for assessing quality early in the acquisition process.

The research and best practice literature regarding the factors that are associated with instructional quality was reviewed. It was found that most evaluation checklists focus on academic instruction or are used by organizations that are paid to evaluate courses. Therefore, we developed a more generic checklist with a set of objective criteria and specific measures for assessing the quality of instructional products developed for military training. The evaluation criteria include assessments of: 1) the instructional content, 2) instructional activities, 3) performance assessment, 4) performance feedback, 5) navigation, 6) content presentation, 7) installation, and 8) registration. This paper has three primary purposes: 1) to provide the instructional quality checklist in a form that is widely accessible to the military services to use as a tool to judge the quality of instructional products that are being developed or procured; 2) to provide information on how this checklist can be used; and 3) to describe plans for improving and using the checklist in the future.