Defining Content Quality
Technology and distance learning deliveries certainly changed the conversation about content. Content once resided in the faculty and in the book. Then came handouts, overhead, Powerpoints, the web, Flash activities, RSS feeds, digital library services, audio, video, ipods, and now phones that allow you to download complete songs.
So what defines the quality of content in online courses?
Its relevance to the instruction it supports
Its design
The learner’s use of it
It's all about the teaching ....... and the content?
From the WCET's "Best Practices for Electronically Offered Degree and Certificate programs", value #1:
Education is best experienced within a community of learning where competent professionals are actively and cooperatively involved with creating, providing, and improving the instructional program.
Students have two distinct forms of interaction with faculty when participating in an online class. First, they meet the faculty through the content the faculty has provided. Second, they interact with the faculty where the faculty comes online (into the classroom space) to facilitate the course. Good practice then suggests that well-designed quality guidelines would address both these areas of contact - the online materials and the "classroom" interaction - and that those guidelines would also emphasize the professional development of faculty.
Evaluating quality - Course Facilitation
How do quality guidelines support and improve course facilitation?
CCCOnline’s guidelines around facilitation are available in our Faculty Gold document, found at http://www.ccconline.org/faculty/faculty_goldstar.htm.
In fact, the majority of the overall course quality indicators we currently use are around course facilitation.
Currently we look at:
- syllabus
- schedule
- announcements
- threaded discussions
- gradebook
As an aid to increasing the general level of faculty support and also as a much needed reward to exemplary faculty, we have tried to build a reward system into the quality guidelines. Each year we offer a one day faculty conference with a lunch time awards ceremony. At the ceremony we recognize our exemplary faculty in front of their peers and attempt the thank them for all of the wonderful work they do all year. This is especially meaningful for our faculty as most of them are distant, so this is the one time of year they visit in person with their peers.
On a more day-to-day basis, we also pay a slightly higher stipend to faculty who met the requirements of the quality guidelines the previous term.
To support this activity faculty and staff have designed and offer a set of professional development workshops to assist faculty in meeting quality guidelines. These workshops are listed on our website at
http://www.ccconline.org/faculty/training_announce.htm.
Coaching by program chairs and faculty mentors has also become an integral part of communication plan.
Evaluating quality - Course Design
The second critical area for quality guidelines is course design. To date CCCOnline has not incorporated many course design issues into our quality process. We now include only two limited recommendations, both of which are in direct response to student input. The first of these is a schedule page which lists all gradable items and their due dates. The second is a standardized syllabus format. Beyond those sorts of somewhat technical issues we require that all courses meet the learning outcomes agreed upon by each discipline team.
There are numerous rubrics available for course evaluation. We’ve looked at the rubrics used by WebCT for their Exemplary Course Project, the Online Course Evaluation Project (funded by the Hewlett Foundation), eCollege, and Chico State. All of these have made positive impacts on our course design. We have yet to distill them into a rubric that exactly meets our requirements however.
What we've learned about quality guidelines
Our experience has been that the development of quality guidelines both for course design and for course facilitation is a critical step for program success. The development of a set of written quality descriptors that most faculty, students, and administrators can agree upon is a challenging process, made more difficult by any expectations around evaluations and reward. However, that same process generates huge amounts of excitement around the courses and learning processes. Our courses are significantly better for having lived through the process once.
Mapping CCCOnline Current Quality Assurance Practices to WICHE/WCET
Colorado Community Colleges Online has continued to develop its quality assurance program since 2001. In 2004, Colorado Community Colleges Online assembled those practices into a manual. The practices do support the WICHE/WCET best practices and havebeen adopted by all higher accrediting regions in the US, including North Central, CCCOnline's accrediting region
Colorado Community Colleges Online was one of four WCET Outstanding Work (WOW) awardees for this manual(WICHE/WCET, 2004). It is both available for sale to other institutions and ready for the next revision. The most current discussion is about the standards for faculty instructional practices in CCCOnline courses. The purpose of that discussion is to better describe the rationale and practice to also serve as a coaching piece for faculty development.
A map of the quality manual chapters to the best practices can be viewed at this link:
http://www.ccconline.org/misc/CCCO_QAtoWICHE.htm
