My colleague Ben Scragg and I have been reading a lot of Hybrid Pedagogy and other conversations challenging the status quo of designing and teaching online courses. (The status quo seems to come in two forms: ground classes with PowerPoints that have been recorded and put online, or old-style online courses with cookie-cutter activities—“post your reply and respond to two classmates’ posts,” and so on.)
Quality Matters and solid backward design will get us to a point of courses being usable and generally sound, but where else do we put our effort? How do we make our offerings excellent and not just acceptable?
If I were writing my own addendum to the Quality Matters rubric, here’s what I’d include as qualities to measure:
- digital first — Content/experience created for the web
- ethical, learner centered — Course policies, activities, assessments are designed to empower students to control their own learning
- authentic assessments — Student assessment focuses on students’ creating actual professional or scholarly work and receiving feedback
- activity centered — Course work emphasizes student projects, tasks, collaboration, and inquiry, not instructor or textbook content
- human — Course design and delivery emphasizes human interactions: instructor/class, instructor/student, student/student, class as community
- local — Content (at least the front-and-center content) is primarily created by OSU faculty and staff, not a big publisher or elearning company; tools are primarily OSU tools
- open — Uses open content and shares content openly (to students, to people outside the course and the institution)
- accessible — Content and activities are accessible to students of all abilities and on all devices