Conference Presentations

This session will identify the important hallmarks identified by the Higher Learning Commission and the Higher Education Quality Matters Rubric Standards addressing organizational mission and online learning and the relationship to retention.

Case studies encourage students to be active learners and critical thinkers. But in an online course, how can faculty ensure that students are ready to tackle a case, or move forward from one stage of a case to another? Expensive corporate training software can do this, but you don't need to spend money or time learning new technologies. Using the adaptive release settings in many LMSs, faculty can ensure learners have the support they need to work through a case, receiving appropriate feedback along the way.

In addition to the rubric, process, and professional development, implementing Quality Matters at many institutions has been about creating community centered on quality online teaching and course design. A noble goal, but one that is difficult to measure – what does a community look like? How do you know it is growing, or healthy? This presentation shares the results of an ongoing design-based study that uses social network analysis to visualize and analyze community formation during the development of a campus-wide implementation of QM.

Most of the faculty professional development efforts—whether provided by teaching and learning centers or other entities in our campuses—appear to give little attention to assessment design. Developing effective assessments is an intellectually serious task that deserves our undivided attention. In this session, we will analyze a comprehensive framework for designing meaningful assignments that not only measure students' performance, but also promote deep learning.

This session will showcase a sustainable continuous improvement model through a compelling case study of the nursing program at Loma Linda University. Through a unique partnership, Loma Linda and iDesign have worked together to redesign the online RN to BS program.

The goals of this partnership are two-fold; 1. To develop a successful degree program and 2. To implement a Continuous Improvement (CI) program in order to create connections between courses, degree programs and institutional goals and, in turn, support accreditation efforts.  

Join us in a humorous approach to building the instructional designer / faculty subject matter expert relationship. You'll not only laugh -- but also learn more about yourself and your approach to sometimes challenging situations.

Discussion boards are still one of the primary tools used for student interaction within online courses.  However, due to the way the tool has historically been used, students view discussions as busy work and tend to put less than their best effort into the activity.  This inevitably leads to instructor frustration as the tool that promised to mimic traditional conversations in a classroom has fallen short as it degrades to an "I Agree with what they said" type of interaction.

Standard verbs to describe human capabilities, with examples of phrases incorporating action verbs.

This session will provide an overview of the Online Course Development Award process of implementing QM at the University of Northern Iowa. It will explore the partnership that occurs between faculty and instructional developer (ID) as a foundation of the thinking about and application of the design and functionality of the course content following the QM Rubric. The presenters will also discuss the ongoing transformation of the developer and faculty roles to develop and deliver effective online instruction.

This interactive session will focus on the University of Northern Iowa Online Course Development Award process of implementing Quality Matters and the partnership between faculty and instructional developer. The partnership is a foundation for thinking about and applying the course design principles of the QM Rubric.

How did a small, rural, multi-campus community college become one of the top 2 percent of all QM institutions? Come on an interactive journey to discover ideas to achieve QM success at your campus. You'll learn how leadership, internal mentors, faculty workshops, monetary incentives, and a wall of fame motivate faculty to pursue QM Certification. There will be several strategies for how you, too, can get a piece of the pie. Be sure to bring your wireless device to this presentation.

Jill Holmes, Sheryl Barton, and Kim Hansen

The Covid 19 pandemic required that most colleges move to virtual instruction. What started out as a necessity, is now being seen as a tremendous opportunity which has allowed faculty to rethink how they teach their courses both seated and online.

The Online Course Improvement Program (OCIP) at New Mexico State University (NMSU) blends formats and technologies- including using the Quality Matters framework for course design- to provide professional development (PD) for faculty teaching blended and or online courses (http://ocip.nmsu.edu/).

The session presents a new Quality Assurance Taxonomy devised via a Delphi study with a panel comprising shareholders in online higher education at the student, faculty, and administrative levels.  The taxonomy can be used to facilitate both internal and external evaluations and inform quality standards, documents, practices, processes, and measurements.  It introduces a concept no t previously found in literature--the increased criticality of QA dimensions (such as student support and faculty support) that results from the online modality.

Several years ago when we first decided to adopt Quality Matters (QM) on our campus we encountered a problem of buy-in from administration and faculty.  They did not know what QM was all about and did not want to invest the time, energy or money into an unknown. We started a grassroots effort to spread the word about QM through those wonderful early adopters, but we were still missing people. We found there were opportunities at events on campus to prompt QM, but did not have a formal presentation.

Working together, the eLearning Advisory Committee (eLAC), Center for Engagement and Learning, and eLearning developed an internal QM Review process and infrastructure. Using a slow-roll approach, we kicked off internal reviews with only two courses at first, building our pathway as we progressed forward. We will present an architecture of our decision making and creation of processes and support infrastructure, as well as the results of our efforts.

(Poster Session - w/ PPT)

Listen to how two business professors have merged tools supplied by their Learning Management System (LMS) together with publisher teaching assets to achieve QM Standard 4.5 - “A variety of instructional materials is used in the course.” This Standard requires us to sort through instructional technology tools to use in our courses.  In this poster session, we will explain Course Learning Objectives (CLOs) in introductory Economics and Marketing classes, and link them to QM Standard 6.1.