Conference Presentations

What is the QM Community? How can we benefit from it? How can we get involved? Come learn from a group of faculty, instructional designers, administrators, Peer and Master Reviewers, and QM Coordinators who watched as simple conversations resulted in established connections to create the QM Community. Listen to stories about how each of us became a part of the QM Community. Brainstorm with us about how to join the conversation, get connected, and continue blazing new trails in the QM Community.

Panel Discussion with Audience Participation

Even with detailed planning, things can go wrong. In this session, a panel that includes several experienced QM Course Review Managers will present a variety of challenges that have come up during and after course reviews, such as: - Problems with access to course materials - Issues within the review team - Challenges in communication The panelists will discuss how they resolved each snafu or put practices into place to avoid it in the future. Attendees will also have the opportunity to share their review experiences.

Come and see our powerful "One-Stop Interactive Quality Assurance Shop" developed by the Design team of University of Maryland. From our first-hand experiences, you will gain insights into the challenges and opportunities encountered in the process of developing a multi-media based interactive QA system that encompasses a checklist, design templates, and design tutorials.

This session will share ways in which the California State University system has developed a mature and robust QM-based-program for assessing and recognizing blended-online courses, as well as a repository of objectives-indexed exemplars for adoption by other faculty or for modeling by instructional support staff. Resulting resources will be shared with participants via open access. Discussion of how best to implement and accomplish these campus-system outcomes will be encouraged and facilitated and participants will certainly have much to offer.

You are halfway to meeting QM Standards when your course is properly aligned. This workshop will demystify the alignment process with a competency/objective visualization tool. By the end of the session, you will be able to design to align. Whether you are a novice or an expert, there are ways to improve course alignment. Take a look at your blended or online course and blaze new trails to quality. Must be able to bring a blended/online course sample to work on during this session.

How can online instructors maximize the power of digital tools to cultivate QM Standards 5.2 and 6.2 for student engagement and active learning in an engaging online learning experience?  We will peruse the digital tool buffet and sample a collection of tools just right for cultivating QM Standards 5.2 and 6.2 for the online course! We will start with an "appetizer" of general strategies, move to an "entree" of digital tools, and end with a sweet "dessert" application to our own online courses.

Quality Matters is an excellent foundation for online course design, but what happens after the QM review? Once the QM review is over, how is quality ensured?  How does your institution determine when changes in a course warrant a new review?  This session will demonstrate the processes at New Mexico State University Alamogordo used to ensure the quality of the QM approved courses and to ensure the integrity of master courses based on the QM guidelines. It will also include steps used to determine the need for a new review.  

Most institutions have faculty who have been teaching online for decades as well as those just starting out. So how do do you ensure that everyone has a common vision for quality? St. Petersburg College expected more and attained more by making it a college priority:

 100% of faculty certified in the LMS

 100% of online/blended faculty certified in Teaching an Online Course

 100% of faculty developing courses certified in Applying the QM Rubric

GA Southern University launched a QM internal course review pilot in Spring 2015 consisting of 10 teams from 9 disciplines. After course reviews were completed, the teams were asked to write a reflection piece of their experience of the review process. They then shared their reflections with the campus during a poster session for a QM Course Review Showcase. This presentation analyzes those reflections and presents the themes that emerged.

Retention is a hot topic in online courses, where Patterson and McFadden (2009) found dropout rates to be up to 6-7 times higher than the same on-campus programs. However, the QM Rubric can be used to design courses that can lead toward better retention and success of online learners. This session will review some of the literature about online retention and the QM Specific Standards that can help to keep students engaged.

Most campuses have a faculty training or development program, and some may even have a set curriculum for that program. However, they may consider Quality Matters to be a portion of the curriculum all to itself. We have found that embedding the ideals and best practices that Quality Matters embodies?from the underlying principles to the Rubric-- into every training or faculty development event can help to promote the program's effectiveness much more than having QM be a stand-alone initiative.

Due to increasing demand for quality assurance in online courses, the Office of Academic Innovation at Towson University was tasked with developing and launching a system to ensure quality in online courses, and knew that QM would be the right place to start. Over two years, the team studied QM's Rubric and process and collaborated with faculty to develop the Gold Review system, a customized version of the original QM program.

UWF became a Quality Matters Institution in 2010. At that time, there was a concern among administrators that online courses were not meeting the same standards of quality as face-to-face courses.  In the early years, the QM team at UWF was focused on implementation--training reviewers and educating faculty on the benefits of a QM review.  After a very successful implementation period, where we have had 80 courses successfully reviewed, we are now moving into a new phase focused on data analysis of results.

This interactive and engaging session will focus on how online learning principles, specifically the QM General Standards are applied in the face to face classroom.  Often, face to face courses lack clarity around the QM gold standards of "alignment".  Specifically, course goals, objectives, resources, assessments, learner support, etc. become lost to many students due to the "Sage on the Stage" teaching effect.