Faculty Training and Student Perceptions of Online Course Quality

Quality Matters (QM) standards aim to enhance student learning through the quality assurance of online courses. This study tries to answer the question whether faculty training on QM standards enhances online course design as perceived by students in terms of learning objective, instructional material, learner engagement, outcome assessment and course technology. Survey observations collected from the students enrolled in online courses were compared between the treatment group in which instructors have gone through online teaching training related to QM standards and the control group in which instructors have not. The results support that faculty training enhances online course quality in general. More specifically, it was found to have significant effect on learner interaction, marginally significant effects on learning objective, instructional material and outcome assessment, and non-significant effect on course technology.