Online courses developed with innovation and adherence to proven methods as goals can use a distributed process for effectively managing Quality Assurance. This process covers three areas: Technical Functionality, User Experience, Learning Effectiveness. This approach can be adopted for effective Quality Assurance by course development groups with high standards.
This is a process for Quality Assurance standards in online course development for higher ed. professional schools.
In addition to being responsible for developing all of the school’s online degree and non-degree courses, this group has the faculty development role of a traditional teaching and learning center providing faculty consultations to promote student-centered learning, faculty workshops about innovative teaching and learning methods, faculty grant projects and faculty collaborations on projects which bring their own funding to promote innovative teaching and learning methods.
Because of our varied responsibilities, the group takes on the mantle of innovation in online learning as well as a serious responsibility to design learning experiences which use research based standards as a measure of success.
Our mission is defined by two standards: innovation and adherence to proven methods. However, rapid growth and several large projects have caused us to have to develop a process for effectively managing Quality Assurance in the product as delivered.
This process covers three areas:
1) Technical Functionality: Does it function as intended for all users?
2) User Experience: Is it logical and frictionless?
3) Learning Effectiveness: Is it a rich learning experience created with proven methods?
Our institution is a member of Quality Matters and we use the updated higher ed standards as guidelines, but we have applied our own process to online course design Quality Assurance. Our development method is quite bespoke. We prioritize an innovative approach to creating each course and rely upon a close collaboration with the faculty whose expertise in teaching their subject matter is something we recognize as a primary reason for the collaboration. In developing a Quality Assurance standard we have broken down our process into three major components.
Technical Functionality:
Once the course content has been translated into an online course and we’ve created videos if necessary, as well as activities, assignments and assessments, we’ve built them into our platform, then we test the entire course for technical functionality. We have usually someone on the team who’s assigned who is assigned to build out the course and often times there is a subject matter expert or an intermediary that’s either the faculty member or a teaching assistant who is responsible for reviewing course content. The subject matter experts review is a little bit outside of our process, so that is part of the process, but that’s not what we will be discussing now. What is important once those all of those elements have been verified for accuracy, is to make sure that the online experience is functional as intended. We use a platform that is highly modified and wasn’t originally designed for online learning it’s a function of the institution, and for the time being that’s the tool we have to use. We use modifications to create a more seamless, effective and decluttered user experience, especially when it comes to navigation. now this means pushing the platform to work at its limits. We’ve engaged a tester with technical expertise and tools necessary to test on multiple platforms and with multiple versions so that we know that all users who meet the technical requirements
that we support will not encounter any errors. We provide a list of requirements to check against. They go through and click every button and complete every assignment in a substantial way so that we know that when it goes live to a large cohort it will be ready.
The second thing we look at is User Experience:
Is it a logical experience and is as frictionless as it can be? So again for this we have so we engage somebody on our team who has not been familiar with the development process to go through the experience of taking the course and to work through our checklist to make sure that we can identify areas where we can simplify things and make them more logical so that the learning experience is one that is intuitive and as simple as possible. We don’t want this to be an area where unnecessary frustrations are met for our learners.
Third is Learning Effectiveness:
This is word this is what we primarily bring to the table. We want to make it the richest possible learning experience and even though we are innovating, we are building upon a foundation of research based method. So we review that process within our team because this is our area of expertise, generally speaking, and this process is one where we use our internal collaboration to review each other‘s work and make certain that we have not overlooked an opportunity to make an assignment more rich, provide more feedback on an assessment, or to identify a more desirable learning outcome to achieve.
With all of these areas, we work with in the constraints of time resources and the limits of our collaboration. Sometimes we have limits on the amount of time for the faculty member or faculty members teaching a large cohort regarding the amount of feedback they can provide, or what their teaching assistant is able to provide is limited. We don’t have infinite resources so we want to provide the best possible learning experience with the with the resources available. That being said we do have a minimum standard and a particular element of the course isn’t rich enough or doesn’t live up to our standard of innovation and use a proven methods, then we revisit that bring it beyond our minimum standards. In this area, we rely upon our interna; team for this, but we think if it in terms of a distributed method of quality assurance.
We have a team makeup that includes something we call a Course Lead assigned to each course. There are many stakeholders and many people involved, faculty members, the subject matter expert in terms of the course development production management. Many people work on a course and have their hands on it, but an instructional designer is the course lead for an individual course. They are ultimately responsible for the quality assurance of their course before it is handed off.
We call upon this method to distribute our Quality Assurance methods so there are three separate instances where someone other than the course lead is reviewing the work with our standards in hand.
Engagement activity:
Partner up with someone you don't know. Pick something you know well that can be taught in a few minutes. e.g. how to cook a favorite dish, or how to get reimbursed for conference travel. Identify a simple learning outcome. Write down 4-6 steps needed to successfully complete this process. (4 minutes.) Trade with your partner. Now spend 4 minutes evaluating this "lesson" using the three QA areas we discussed: Technical Functionality, User Experience, and Learning Effectiveness.
Sharing: How can the lesson be improved by applying these QA areas from the perspective other than that of the course designer.