Quality Matters (TM) for Online Teaching

[spork]

My employer has been requiring that faculty new to online teaching get Quality Matters certification. The cost has been paid by my employer. I went through the process several years ago and wasn't impressed, but then I'm not the kind of instructor whose courses are nothing but a one-page syllabus, midterm, and final exam -- I know about backward design, etc.

There is now some discussion about whether Quality Matters is worth the price. From my perspective it looks a bit like a rent-seeking organization. Opinions?

[polly_mer]

When I was director of online education, I inherited a requirement that all faculty teaching online take and pass the applying the rubric course in QM.  All that requirement appeared to be doing is weeding out people who couldn't manage to check some boxes in a two-week period.  That's valuable in terms of a first barrier to entry for people who are content experts, but not the instructors we needed, but wasn't all that valuable to the instructors themselves.

However, when I started doing some investigation and letting faculty pick which courses they wanted for which I would pay, there was some value for people who were completely new to online teaching, but were very experienced teachers, to taking courses that helped guide course design.  Online is different and I had to put some effort into getting people to think about how their in-person good-enough class would translate to online.  If nothing else, paying attention to how the QM online courses had good organization with written instructions to help students navigate and understand expectations helped some faculty members do more than put up a reading list and open an ungraded discussion board.

The full certification is probably overkill for most faculty members who are only doing their own courses and aren't part of an institutional effort to construct highly polished, shared courses-in-a-box that the institution owns and instructors mostly do some customization for their particular offering.  There's a place for that, but it wasn't useful at Super Dinky where the goal of training for faculty was to ensure students were getting online education instead of the one very memorable course that turned out to be a reading list, easily ignored once-every-two-week discussion boards, and a final paper of under 5 pages.

[mythbuster]

Our Office of Instructional Technology is also pushing this, with monetary incentives for completing the courses. I've heard from people who have done the courses that it's mind numbingly boring and all about how you organize your modules.  So of little use to those who are thoughtful in their course design to begin with.

[apl68]

There's a place for that, but it wasn't useful at Super Dinky where the goal of training for faculty was to ensure students were getting online education instead of the one very memorable course that turned out to be a reading list, easily ignored once-every-two-week discussion boards, and a final paper of under 5 pages.

That sounds an awful lot like an online course I took about seven or eight years ago while pursuing my professional degree.  Both the prof and the TA were AWOL from the classroom message boards for a week or more at a time.  Assignments were mostly canned quizzes and such that came with the textbook we were required to buy.  The final paper, which involved group work, was a little more substantial than what you describe, and seems to have been graded easily.  Frankly, most of what we learned we taught each other through those online discussions that the prof and TA didn't participate in.

Thankfully most of the courses I took for that online degree program were much more substantial.  The experience with that one bad apple has given me an appreciation of what so much online instruction at four-profit schools and borderline online programs elsewhere must look like.  It's saddening to think that many of the students taking these programs don't even know enough to realize that they're being had.