Reflections on Participating in the Quality Matters Program
In Summer of 2016, I enrolled in the online training course, Applying the QM Rubric. One of the faculty in the Health Sciences IMPACT Studio had suggested I take this class as she felt it might be helpful in answering some questions I had about structuring online courses. The course is brief, only 2 weeks in length, and is intended as a basic introduction for people who are interested in becoming QM evaluators. QM is an organization dedicated to providing training and support to improve the quality of online teaching. While I was not planning on becoming an evaluator, my colleague felt that the course would provide me the opportunity to learn the QM rubric which could help me think about designing and improving the online courses I was teaching.
Although I teach in totally online programs, I was a bit skeptical and nervous about taking an online course. I had done brief online workshops before but had never actually been a student in an online course. I had seen the challenge my own students faced working coursework into their busy professional and personal schedules. Given how busy I was with research commitments and newly becoming the primary caregiver for an older adult, I was only too cognizant that time management and truly committing to the process would be critical for success.
Although I approached with the course with some apprehension, and a little scepticism, I almost immediately became engrossed in the process. I was really impressed with the level of thoughtful detail in the QM Higher Education rubric. It was very helpful, specific, and concise yet it still covered a very broad range of factors that make for a quality online course. In addition, despite how detailed and thorough the standards are, the content, examples, and exercises provided throughout the course helped me appreciate how achievable these standards can be for most of my courses.
I really appreciated the tone of the writing in both the rubric and the course materials that stressed this process was colleagial and designed to help improve courses. In particular, the course emphasized providing feedback to other faculty/learners that is balanced, measureable, achievable. I have taken what I learned beyond this course and applied it to giving feedback to students and research team members. Whether or not students notice a difference I cannot say but I feel more confident giving feedback that I believe is kind and respectful but helpful, encouraging and practical.
I certainly wish I’d had the tools, skills, and information I learned in this course when I first began at GW. Although upon reflection, perhaps the experience of teaching several online courses before being exposed to this material gave me a greater appreciation for the importance of aligning course learning objectives and activities. I personally found it a helpful way of thinking about how to build an effective online course. While many of the guidelines are fairly straightforward, I’m not sure they are entirely obvious, that is, I wouldn’t thought of them on my own. There has clearly been a lot of thought in developing these standards. Having them laid out in such a clear and rational manner with good examples, made them really approachable.
Finally, I really appreciated all the teaching resources mentioned throughout the course. I bookmarked a lot of them and refer back to these periodically as I revise my courses. One important lesson I took away was that online courses need to be organized in a way that students can easily find what they are looking for. One small feature I picked up from the resources given was to organize the navigation menu in Blackboard so that it is not just a string of resources but rather to group these logically and to add sub-headings. Then I added a welcome paragraph on the “Start Here” page to help guide students to the navigation bar.Some of the standards I already have in place in my courses and that was encouraging. Others, like organizing the online tools and pages, I am working on as each class comes up in rotation. Other standards that will I believe are important for improving my online classes will take more time, in particular, writing better unit objectives and ensuring these are aligned with the overall course objectives. I feel this is my biggest challenge that I continue to work on but one that is definitely worth the effort.