BYU-Idaho’s continual course improvement model uses an innovative organizational structure to foster effective collaboration between full-time university faculty, online adjunct instructors, and online instructional designers. This model maximizes the expertise of all parties and the result is a structure and process for continuous improvement of online students’ experiences.
Brigham Young University-Idaho has a very diverse student body. The university serves traditional campus-based students as well as fully online students. In 2018, the university served 35,000 campus-based students and 18,000 fully online students (for a total of over 53,000 matriculated students). The students come from all 50 states and 63 international countries. An additional 30,000 pre-matriculated online students were also served through its PathwayConnect program in 2018.
To serve this diverse student body, BYU-Idaho has created a centralized online organization dedicated to the design, development, and delivery of online courses and programs. This online organization works in close collaboration with academic departments to provide courses for both the campus-based students as well as the fully online students. Currently there are over 350 online courses and approximately 1600 sections of these courses are taught each semester. The vast majority of these online sections are taught by remote online adjuncts who are contracted by the online organization.
To help facilitate quality learning experiences, the online organization has developed a model for course design and improvement that is unique to Higher Ed. This model is called a Course Council. The Course Council is an innovative organizational structure that fosters effective collaboration between full-time university faculty, online adjunct instructors, and online instructional designers. The result of this model is a structure and a process for continuous improvement of online students’ learning experiences.
A Course Council consists of a full-time faculty member (called a course lead), an online adjunct instructor (called an online course representative), and a curriculum designer. Each member of the course council brings a unique perspective to improving the quality of the learning experiences within the online courses. The full-time faculty member is the team member who has knowledge of the course outcomes, the key assessments, the content, and the content pedagogy. The online adjunct instructor brings a detailed understanding of the students’ experience. And the online instructional designer brings a deep understanding of online design and pedagogy. The Course Council is the decision-making body for an online course.
The responsibilities of the Course Council are:
- Meets once per semester to review assessment and evaluation data and identify opportunities to improve the course.
- Meets more frequently during development or improvement projects.
- Communicate as needed throughout the semester to resolve course issues.
- Carefully considers BYU-Idaho’s three imperatives when making course decisions.
- Understand and follow established policies and procedures related to improving the course.
The Course Council structure allows all members to offer their unique skills, knowledge, and experience as they discuss issues in a spirit of cooperation and collaboration. Council members listen to each other’s ideas with open minds and discuss proposals respectfully and rigorously. And then decide which changes and improvements to make in the course.
Course improvements are facilitated by an online tool called a Course Council Data Portal. This tool is a database that contains all the key data and metrics associated with the course. These metrics include:
- Enrollments
- Student Credit Hours
- Section Sizes
- # of Open Seats
- Drop Rates
- Fail Rates
- Retake Rates
- Student Demographics
- Age
- Gender
- Students Location
- etc
- Materials Costs
- Course Satisfaction Ratings
- Instructor Satisfaction Ratings
- Perceived Learning Ratings
- Comprehensive Assessment Information
- All summative assessments are available for review
- Course Grade Distributions
- Time spent on assignments
- LMS Data
- Time on tasks
- Number of login’s/week
- etc
These metrics inform the Course Council on problem areas within the courses and allows for data driven decisions to systematically improve the students’ learning experiences.
The result of this structure has been a significant improvement in student learning and in student satisfaction in the online courses. Data shows a significant and systematic improvement in course satisfaction ratings over the last 7 semesters.