Overview

Quality assurance is important in any course format, but it’s extremely important in an online course because of the lack of regular face-to-face meetings in which course issues can be clarified. Many factors affect online courses. For starters, we want to get students past the logistics of how we package our course and we want to move them towards engaging with the content and each other. When we are teaching, we engage in two distinct activities: we design a course (by making decisions about content, materials, interactions, etc.) and we proceed to interact with our students as we carry our course out. Out of those two activities, we receive far less training in online course design. We receive little to no training on how to design courses and most of what we learn, we learn along the way when we assess our teaching. We also receive little training on how to lead and facilitate an online course, so how do we know how we are doing?

Having a mechanism by which we can assess course design and facilitation can provide insights into how you are doing in your course, and it provides us with important data that helps us make additional decisions once our course is over. Remember, the course design process is an iterative activity, meaning the data you collect from a semester should be “fed back into the loop” so you can make data-driven decisions regarding your future online course design.

While there is a plethora of quality assurance rubrics, in this lesson, you will explore three frameworks that address quality assurance in your online course. Two of them, Quality Matters (QM) and Open SUNY Course Quality Review (OSCQR), will deal with course design, while Penn State’s offering will explore course delivery.