This presentation will engage program attendees in a discussion of the value of alternative pathways to achieve quality in online programs and to demonstrate the impact of internal QM reviews on institutional culture and quality improvement on programs and courses.
Since May 2012, the Provost named eight Online Learning Council (OLC) Fellows to augment the process of supporting quality improvement in online education. The OLC Fellows represent departments across the University, acting as ambassadors and champions of the Online Learning Council, disseminating the work of the Council to the broad Drexel community, and serving as catalysts for educational quality and innovation. The OLC Fellows have extensive experience with online teaching, online course design, and online course design review. All OLC Fellows are certified Quality Matters™ Master Reviewers.
In addition, 75 members of the university community hold credentials as a QM Trainer, Master Reviewer or Peer Reviewer. Many have obtained or are obtaining these credentials with University funding, resulting in many members of the community serving as peer reviewers or subject matter experts on review teams. This has a two-fold outcome of reducing the OLC Fellows’ workload and expanding the reach of the program to other departments and academic units.
The presenters seek to justify the program costs through examination of qualitative measures such as QM rubric comments and quantitative scores on QM standards. In addition, the presentation will discuss and evaluate an alternative pathway to towards quality that, though not as robust as QM, is cost efficient and more acceptable to faculty within the University. The presentation will provide a side-by-side comparison of an alternative path that may be considered as a stepping-stone to a QM internal review.
