Conference Presentations

See information on what resources QM Research and Innovation offers and how to use these resources.

You are starting to implement QM at your institution and are really excited about it! It provides a great tool for designing and delivering well-crafted online courses geared to student engagement and achievement of student learning outcomes. But then…others don’t seem as excited; why is that? In this session you will learn about the Quality Assurance Continuum of Excellence – a tool that charts how schools move along a progression toward a culture of online quality infused throughout the organization.

There are many factors to consider when using videos in online courses, and this session will identify some of those key factors. This will be done by highlighting the educational research to present a framework for quality online course videos that can guide your development and usage of video in online courses. We will also review what factors to consider as you review future research articles and identify what it means for your practice as an educator.

Since 2003, Quality Matters (QM) has been a pioneer of best practices in the field of instructional design. Standards 7 and 8 of the QM Higher Education Rubric (6th edition, 2018) provide critical guidance on making online courses accessible to learners with disabilities. In addition, the Universal Design for Learning framework emphasizes an inclusive, proactive approach to course development for faculty, instructional designers, and support staff.

High impact educational practices (HIPs) are touted for their association with student retention and engagement; however, implementation of these practices at most institutions is “unsystematic” (Kuh, 2008, p. 9). To address this concern, my institution is developing an intentional approach to foster faculty engagement with HIPs with the goal of embedding them across the curriculum. This initiative has led to the development of resources to support faculty and staff work in HIPs including a review of research, revealing significant gaps in what we know about them.

Quality feedback is a crucial ingredient in learning. In any design process, a designer must understand the user’s needs, assess trade-offs and analyze alternatives based on a list of criteria. A fully online MBA program developed with quality assurance processes and goals utilized module surveys and end of the course student evaluations to improve course design. The College of Business Administration (CoBA) is dedicated to creating competitive online courses to meet the needs of students, employers, and faculty.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought educational gaps into stark relief. In K-12, it highlighted the professional development teachers needed - and did not have - in order to design high quality courses that would enable them to work well with all of their students. In this presentation we will discuss those needs and a variety of options available for filling them.

This session will take the format of a panel discussion framed by Gay's (2010) six attributes of culturally responsive teaching. The five-member panel will provide concrete examples of online instructional design and subsequent delivery practices that are reflective of Gay's six attributes of culturally responsive learning environments being validating, comprehensive, multi-dimensional, empowering, transformative, and emancipatory.

Join this session for a brief overview of research related to student views of quality online learning followed by an active discussion about how we might include the student point of view in future research projects. What questions should we ask? What do we need to know to help tomorrow’s students succeed? Bring your ideas!

QM looks at internal data to understand how our services are being used in the community and how we should improve them. We have been using Intellectus Statistics software in these endeavors for the last half of 2020. Come learn about this statistical software, how QM has used it to our advantage, and how you can, too.