Quality Matters

In Fall 2019, I completed a one-day certification course on the Quality Matters Rubric for creating and assessing the accessibility, effectiveness, and pedagogical design of online courses. Quality Matters is a nationally recognized certification program for online education.

The program website explains:

General Standards and Specific Review Standards are the benchmarks for evaluating the design of online and blended courses. Research-based, grounded in best-practices and fully annotated, these standards are the keys to achieving the goals of ensuring quality for learners — and for you to deliver on your promise to them.

Through this training, I practiced the kind of peer review tasks that a Quality Matters reviewer would undertake to assess whether an online course is clear, intelligible, and coherent. We discussed the importance of integration of course learning objectives and module learning objectives, making sure the online course environment is easy to navigate, and creating content and materials that are accessible and support students in achieving learning objectives.