Conference Presentations

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.

We will share our approach of integrating QM principles, peer review, and course creation into our Distance Learning Design Seminar and other faculty development workshops.  This provides a "Gateway" for quality, faculty-developed, student-centered courses.

This study contributes to a better understanding of instructors’ perceptions of equity issues within online teaching and learning. The researchers interviewed 21 instructors at one university across disciplines regarding their experience with and recommendations for attending to issues of inclusion, diversity, equity, and access (IDEA) in online teaching. Findings revealed that instructors characterized online teaching and IDEA issues as distinct skill sets and that they were not necessarily prepared to apply IDEA issues in online teaching.

Towson University's Gold Review Process enables faculty-centered, collaborative peer-reviews of online courses using a customized version of the QM Rubric. In this session, the Director of Distance Education and four faculty members (Family Studies, Health Professions, and Mathematics) who served as Reviewers will share (1) how the Gold Review Process has progressed since its inception in 2015, including plans to scale up in 2018; (2) reflections on becoming certified peer reviewers; and (3) reflections on serving as Gold Review Team members within our institution. 

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.

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.

Do you still have faculty trying to teach online classes the same way they teach F2F classes? It is not the same! Training prior to teaching is imperative. How can it be accomplished? Expand the possibilities on your campus and hear how this small CC campus handles training with limited resources.

In this session, participants will gain hands-on familiarity with an innovative program assessment process that has been shown to be effective for implementing meaningful, iterative assessment and in building faculty buy-in for assessment in large, multi-campus, online programs. Participants will leave the session with specific ideas for improving quality assurance processes at their institutions and for making assessment more engaging for faculty.

Are your learning objectives not quite feeling right? Perhaps you have some fake objectives? Or maybe the alignment is upside down?  Let us help you identify topics, assessments, activities, and instructional materials masquerading as objectives and evaluate upside-down alignment.

Grab your accreditation surfboard and ride the wave to QM implementation with us!  From the experience of a mid-size, underfunded state institution, hear how QM has become a beacon of quality assurance across the university.

Join us as we share our process for training and supporting new online faculty within the context of QM's Standards.

Join us as we share our process for training and supporting new online faculty within the context of QM's Standards.

Join us as we share our process for training and supporting new online faculty within the context of QM's Standards.

Walk around the edge of the QM Research pool to see what it looks like - and then dive in for a true understanding of what's under the surface. Get comfortable in the water so you can take a dip whenever you like.

This session will focus on design & delivery techniques to better gather and use feedback in your online class. We'll cover: 1) individual feedback ideas for engagement and connection, 2) time-saving ideas for group feedback and auto-feedback, 3) soliciting feedback for continous improvement, and 4) using the feedback loop for "just-in-time" online teaching strategies.

Students value individualized and timely feedback. However, suboptimal course design can limit instructors' ability to meet feedback expectations. 

This presentation focuses on designing courses using feeding cycles, which leverage feedforward to make room for high quality feedback.

To promote compliance with accessibility mandates, we developed a workflow to provide timely, accurate and cost-effective closed captioning for instructional materials.  We share details about this process, and data about significant benefits of the captioning for ALL students.

Wouldn't it be great to be a new college? Distance learning courses, proactively designed from scratch to meet accessibility standards, would eliminate terms like "legacy course" and "faculty buy-in".  Imagine a world where WCAG did not require a Google search on acronyms.

Trying to determine what professional development (PD) opportunities best meet faculty and staff needs? This session can help! Join QM's Senior Manager of PD and a Dean of eLearning + QM Coordinator with a wealth of experience in this area as they guide you through: the different pathways available for QM professional development, how QM PD can aid your implementation journey and support your goals, and how to choose the right PD (at the right time) for your faculty and staff needs.