With rubrics emerging against which to measure course quality, institutions are working to ensure that online course offerings are achieving quality standards. Focusing on impacting student success, this session examines research findings for student perceptions of quality courses to determine how effectively these perspectives are represented within quality rubrics.
The concept of quality is neither new, nor necessarily innovative in the world of online course design. As the field of online course design has grown, so has the concern for the quality of the courses being offered to students. For more than a decade, there has been a push for formalizing review processes that search for best practice design factors within online courses at higher ed institutions across the nation. With the emergence of various quality assurance rubrics, institutions are calling upon instructional designers to ensure that online course offerings are reaching quality standards and obtaining quality designations.The focus of this discovery session is to examine the research, through a literature review, on student perceptions of important factors within online course design. Special attention will be placed on how these perceptions are being included in popular quality course design rubrics, such as Quality Matters.
Defining quality in online learning can be complex in theory. With the growth of attention on this idea, defining quality has been at the height of many of these conversations. What defines quality for students? Can it be measured? Is it purely based on student experiences? What do you do with the data collected? All of these questions are at the heart of this session’s findings. By defining and measuring quality, one is able to focus on improving online courses, to both enhance faculty and student satisfaction, as well as student learning outcomes.
The importance of the work being done regarding quality assurance for online courses, specifically with the use of rubrics, cannot be denied. Yet, with higher ed institutions’ focus on student success, it is vital that students are at the center of this process. The final goal of these quality reviews is to increase student success, so the question emerges whether we, as a field, are addressing the value that students place on the factors that we deem necessary for quality course design. Throughout the literature, many studies have been conducted researching what components of course design students value and relating these perceptions to quality review rubrics.
Through our analysis and presentation of relevant literature, attendees of our discovery session will be able to:
-
Explain what factors are common in defining online course quality
-
Identify quality course rubric items that students perceive to be important to their success
-
Compare the value that students place on these rubric items with the weight associated to these items within quality course rubrics
-
Appraise additional items of online course quality that are not commonly found in rubrics, based on student feedback