Improving Course Design Quality Through Online Graduate Student Evaluations

Quality feedback is a crucial ingredient in learning. In any design process, a designer must understand the user’s needs, assess trade-offs and analyze alternatives based on a list of criteria. A fully online MBA program developed with quality assurance processes and goals utilized module surveys and end of the course student evaluations to improve course design. The College of Business Administration (CoBA) is dedicated to creating competitive online courses to meet the needs of students, employers, and faculty. In an effort to create quality online courses, CoBA has elected to adopt standards of online course design based on the Quality Matters (QM) Rubric™. One of these standards is use of a College-approved learning management system course shell template that includes module surveys. Module surveys focus on the module design by asking about rigor, alignment, interaction, clarity of instructions, and learning activities. The module survey data is reviewed after each offering of the course and paired with the student end-of-the-course evaluations to identify areas for revisions. This data has been extremely helpful in providing a pathway to improve the course design through the user experience.