How to Ensure Quality Online Classes
With the prevalence of MOOCs, it is becoming more and more essential that organizations engage in robust quality assurance practices. This guide will get you started.
This brief how-to guide focuses on ensuring quality in online classes. However, many of the principles articulated here are applicable to face-to-face classes as well. Additionally, the standards referenced here can easily be substituted with the standards that are relevant in your particular field or state.
“Quality decision making is never black and white. A million shades of gray exist with no clear boundary between them. For this reason, quality is more about the values, principles, and processes established before any decision is ever made.”
— Alan Tsuda
First and foremost, Quality Assurance is not a one-person job. Of course quality is everybody’s responsibility, but ultimately, decisions regarding quality need to belong to a group or a committee, not an individual.
That said, here are some guidelines that will help to ensure a high-quality online course:
1. The Quality Assurance Committee (The Committee) must have the power and authority to both approve OR reject a course. It cannot merely function as a rubber stamp for a powerful individual.
2. The Committee must have the power and authority to institute standards.
3. The Committee must have the power and authority to determine what percentage of the standards must be met in order for a course to be approved or rejected.
4. A “crosswalk” document should be used: that is, a spreadsheet that demonstrates, for example, that Standard A is met on pages X, Y, and Z.
5. The crosswalk document needs to be publicly available to all members of the organization; it cannot be a secret.
6. Committee membership must change from time to time. A replacement member once a year, for example, is one method of committee “refreshing”.
7. The Committee must include someone from outside the core group. That is, if a Science course is being reviewed, someone from the Committee must work somewhere other than the Science department.
A note on standards:
Use the standards that are relevant to your particular situation. If you’re producing online courses for high school students in Mississippi, you’ll need to be familiar with Mississippi state standards for the subject you’re teaching. Regardless of where you’re teaching, you should be familiar with iNACOL’s standards or QualityMatters’ standards for what constitutes a high-quality online course. If your courses don’t meet those standards, it’s a low-quality course.
A note on Modular System Design:
You must build your courses modularly. Standards evolve so frequently that it is essential that a simple mechanism exist for the updating of your courses. If a headlight goes out in your car, do you want to replace the headlight, or replace the entire car?
Keep the principles of Modular System Design in mind when designing your courses: you don’t want to have to rebuild the entire course if you find a typo in Lesson 78. Importantly, it’s easy to simply agree to this in principle. It’s much harder to get into the technical details of HOW a course will be updated: don’t approve the development or redevelopment of a course until you have a full and detailed understanding of what the updating/revision process looks like.
First-hand experience:
It’s hard to imagine a committee member being in any position to assess quality if they have not recently taken a course themselves. While you can certainly take classes in person or online through UCSC Silicon Valley, you can also take free online courses through Coursera (and other MOOC sites).
Final thoughts on course development:
Each and every development or redevelopment of a course is a project. As such, it is strongly recommended that you put someone with Project Management training in charge of the projects — otherwise you end up with failure, debt, and products that nobody wants.
