Conference Presentations

Building rapport, establishing clear success criteria, and providing descriptive feedback are key ingredients for online learning success, as championed by Quality Matters.  We welcome you to the table for collaborative conversation and interactive practice. Join us as we share key strategies you can season to fit your learning environment! 

This presentation discusses micro-credentials and describes our process for creating a definition of micro-credentials for a continuing education training program. It will discuss the QM Continuing Education Rubric and how that rubric was applied to each short course in the micro-credentials. Finally, it will discuss challenges and lessons learned through the development of micro-credentials. 

Are your online presentations reaching all your students? This session will discuss strategies to elevate online presentations to meet the needs of all students.  This session is grounded in research and will include role playing and open discussion of best practices to support presentations supported by Universal Design for Learning. 

Tired of the usual grading methods and point-driven students? Come learn about three alternative grading strategies that focus on feedback, which is a key piece for improving learning. Our presentation will focus on specifications grading, contract grading, and ungrading. We’ll also examine strengths and challenges of each as well as their alignment with QM Specific Review Standards 3.2 and 3.3. 

Technology doesn’t just augment the educational experience but revolutionizes it. In this session, attendees will delve deep into the power of AI in the classroom, particularly focusing on ChatGPT. You’ll discover how AI can take your lesson planning from hours to minutes, provide personalized feedback to students, and offer innovative approaches to OER curriculum design—all aligned with UDL guidelines. Through demonstrations and activities, you'll see how AI can help create a diverse, inclusive learning environment while achieving high-quality instructional outcomes.

Learn how UMBC successfully addressed challenges faced during emergency remote teaching and developed a scalable solution for quality online course design based on the QM rubric. Analyze your institutional climate, identify stakeholders, and set goals to support QM adoption that is faculty-driven and student-centered. Our vision board revealed a pathway for faculty to learn how to apply the Rubric, utilize QM’s Concept of Alignment, and improve course accessibility and usability. 

Follow our human designers as they journey through a new course design project, while agreeing  to an exciting new proposal: fully committing to artificial intelligence as their co-designer the moment they first meet. Will it be a match made in cyberspace or will the pair be destined for doom? Join us to find out if the pair will stay together…or if they will split up! 

Are your workforce program’s learning outcomes and curriculum relevant to today’s employer’s needs? Are your faculty and administrators aware of the current industry and workforce trends? Workforce program aligned advisory councils can help answer these questions. Their purpose is to support workforce program quality assurance. Learn how to form, facilitate and use academic program advisory councils. 

We are revolutionizing professional development for part time faculty! Come see how we transformed a 32 week program, specific to our part time faculty, to shortened terms of  8 weeks.  We achieved a 70% increase in completions and improved learner success.

Would you like to learn strategies to empower your student’s agency in your course?  This session will discuss how voice and choice strategies were integrated in online environments to promote learner agency. 

Oregon State University College of Engineering and Ecampus have partnered to establish the Center for Research in Online Engineering Education, which conducts research projects on online engineering education and provides seed grants for SoTL research related to online engineering courses. The partnership has funded four research projects in its first two years and may result in the creation of tenure-track positions in computing and engineering education in the College of Engineering. 

This presentation will introduce the emerging field of Learning Engineering and demonstrate how instructional design plays a role in learning engineering which also engages learning science, human-centered design and data analytics to create scalable learning environments in all modalities. Participants will learn the components of learning engineering through case studies. Using this information, participants will develop a plan of how to implement this process at their own institution. 

The Student Experience Project identified seven learning conditions correlated to student retention and success, notably for historically-underrerpresented learners. These conditions include belonging certainty, identity safety, institutional growth mindset, and self-efficacy. Each is linked to pedagogical interventions that quantifiably raise retention and success. Data indicates that combining QM standards with SEP strategies has greater impact for online learners than for F2F courses.

Students often struggle to navigate the online learning environment, getting lost in their courses and becoming frustrated or discouraged. As a result of unclear expectations and navigation, engagement, grades, and retention can be adversely affected. In this session, we will share key takeaways from planning and executing "boot camp" style workshops at each of the five Alamo Colleges in San Antonio, Texas.

Successful LMS transition requires implementing course tools and design best practices. Incentivizing faculty to attend training and integrate skills into course shells is meaningful. Faculty members attended training and obtained badges with a 75% acceptance rate. This session focuses on identifying the benefits of badges to promote an LMS transition, showing how an assessment guide can serve as badge metadata, and examines the design approach used to develop a QM-based LMS transition training. 

Are students actively engaged in your online course? Does your course encourage organic conversations driven by the students? This session is grounded in research that will include open discussion of strategies to integrate experiential learning communities into the course design.

Looking to level up your teaching game? Join us for a session on gamification in education and discover how to increase student motivation and engagement through the power of game mechanics. Learn about successful examples of gamification, gain practical design strategies and tools, and explore the potential of gamification to enhance student learning outcomes. Join IDLA teachers and developers to explore the power of gamification and take your teaching to the next level! 

In this presentation, we will discuss how to foster a culture of quality in online teaching by providing instructors with flexible and varied design approaches. We will explore ways to enhance instructor presence using shareable templates, which are pre-approved courses that maintain alignment standards in the course design process. Shareable courses provide instructors with built-in course delivery options, giving them more flexibility in teaching the course without compromising on quality.

We are revolutionizing professional development for part time faculty! Come see how we transformed a 32 week program, specific to our part time faculty, to shortened terms of  8 weeks.  We achieved a 70% increase in completions and improved learner success.

Faculty and instructional designers who are new to Quality Matters often feel unsure or intimidated by the process of QM professional development, which leads to QM roles. I remember feeling lost when I was first introduced to QM several years ago. During last year's QM Connect conference, I was approached by several people with questions on how to become a Master Reviewer. Join this session for some answers about your peers' QM professional development journey.