Conference Presentations

High Impact Practices (HIPs) have been getting a lot of attention recently. And why not? With data linking them to increased retention, persistence, and course satisfaction (Kuh, 2008) HIPs seem like a guaranteed ticket to academic success! However, rallying behind one or more HIP can seem like a daunting task when it comes to online education.

Despite the laws, publications, trainings, and standards out there for accessibility, the technical details still remain a very “gray” topic. How do you move forward with improving your courses for accessibility?  This presentation will include some of the tricky technical information about accessibility requirements (Standards 8.3 and 8.4) Excelsior College has encountered during our 3 year project to make all our online courses accessible and strategies that we have used to make the conversion as painless as possible.

This session will discuss practical strategies for engaging students in online courses, including how to make your course feel welcoming, how to use interactive social media in your course, and how to manage group work effectively in the online learning environment.

This session will discuss practical strategies for engaging students in online courses, including how to make your course feel welcoming, how to use interactive social media in your course, and how to manage group work effectively in the online learning environment.

In this session we will discuss strategies used to engage faculty and staff in designing courses that align with the QM Rubric including professional development workshops that address Standards 2, 4, and 5. We will share how we are measuring success in terms of engagement and course quality.

Faculty responsibilities in higher ed continue to grow. At the same time, there are more instructional designers in higher ed than ever before. How can these two groups of professionals collaborate for a more productive and higher-quality course design - making the best use their time?

Research shows that 25% is the tipping point for social change. Malcolm Gladwell developed a model for starting social change beginning with identifying "mavens," "connectors," and "salespeople." Apply this model in the adaption of QM and ongoing QA. Are you a maven, a connector, or a salesperson?

Are your courses designed around the Quality Matters Standards, but you know there may still be issues with delivery? Do you have faculty teaching online courses who think it is easier than face-to-face? If so, come hear how New Mexico State University-Alamogordo is implementing delivery standards for online faculty. Come learn about NMSU's standards, how they were developed, the process of implementing them, and methods of tying them to online observations and online student evaluations.

Come learn how to make your online courses meet federal accessibility requirements using Standard 8 of the QM Rubric and WCAG 2.1 guidelines. As a take-away, you receive an example of an accessibility checker that aligns with Standard 8.

In our presentation, we discuss our institution's accessibility best practices and how we aligned them with the Standard 8 of the QM Rubric. In our gap analysis, we found out that, even though Standard 8 does an excellent job to start the course accessibility process, full course accessibility status takes understanding WCAG 2.1 guidelines and their correlation to Standard 8 of the QM Rubric.

This session describes the unique partnership of a college faculty member and a high school teacher as they gain expertise with the QM Rubric and peer review process before leading a statewide effort to create and certify a hybrid high school English course that will likely reach thousands of high school students across the state of California, and beyond.

This session will explain the benefits and rationale from applying QM framework to a course template in an LMS to embedded intelligent course design across all course delivery formats. Models and visual examples of how templates and course shells (pre-designed before faculty are added to courses) align with several Specific Review Standards from the QM Rubric.

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.

Students recognize quality when they see it. Come learn how students view markers of quality online education and about a study that shows how they vote with their feet. You will walk away knowing how to communicate your quality to students.

Data is key for making decisions about learning effectiveness. Good surveys are key tools in producing such data. Come find out about a vast curated list of surveys and how they might help you collect the data you need!

In this session the presenters  will discuss various online learning tools that have been used to bring a very traditional course (Early British Literature) into the online era, and by using the QM Rubric as a blueprint for the online course, we were able to make substantial improvements to the seated/blended versions of this course as well.

In this presentation we will look at actual examples of how this weighty topic was approached in the online format, including entertaining mini lectures, online resources, and group discussion forums.     

With a higher expectation of quality in online courses, our department has found great success in implementing a standard prototype phase into the course development process. This allows developers to conceptualize and build a small portion of the course and conduct a review using the QM Rubric to catch potential quality issues/concerns before continuing development of the course. This session explores the prototype development, prototype review its impact on the quality of our online courses.

In October 2017, Athens State University embarked on an effort to increase adoption of QM throughout our campus.  While doing so, one rule was required - QM adoption had to be voluntary, not required.  With that, the university set off in an attempt to change the campus culture and view of quality online courses.  Since that time, we have had over 30+ classes QM certified by multiple unique faculty members with many more waiting in line to go through the process.

This session will share efforts to scale up PD opportunities for faculty at the system and campus level during COVID. Results gathered from a 29-item COVID faculty survey will be shared along with campus qualitative student feedback results.