WHAT IS QM?
Everywhere you turn these days you'll find people talking about online learning—from for-profit schools offering online degrees to traditional institutions forming online consortiums. Given the wealth of options that are becoming available to students, schools will need to find ways to set themselves apart from the rest of the crowd.
Quality Matters is an emerging national standard for quality in online instruction. The heart of the process is a rubric for measuring the design quality of online learning sites. This rubric is designed by faculty for faculty, and is updated on a regular basis to stay current with instructional technology and pedagogical best practices. While the rubric can be used as an informal benchmark for developing your course site, Quality Matters also offers a peer review process by which an online course can receive QM certification and the privilege of being formally recognized on the Quality Matters website.
HOW DO I START?
Are you teaching an online or hybrid class? Are you interested in what Quality Matters has to offer you? You might want to consider the following training opportunities:
- Foundations of Online / Hybrid Course Development & Delivery
- The university requires faculty teaching an online course to complete IDeL's Foundations workshop. A major emphasis for the workshop is becoming acquainted with the QM rubric and learning how to structure your course to meet the rubric's standards.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO YOU?
Grand Valley is now an official QM subscribing institution. This gives us the opportunity to use the rubric for training and evaluation, as well as the option of having our courses reviewed for Quality Matters certification.
While we're still in the early stages of our plans for implementing QM, the IDeL team hopes that adopting this standard will ensure a consistent and high-quality student experience for hybrid and online courses at Grand Valley. And with Grand Valley's growing presence in online education, pursuing Quality Matters certification for our courses will demonstrate the university's commitment to teaching excellence, regardless of whether students ever set foot on campus or not.