Grades 6-12 Quality Matters Rubric

                The Quality Matters Program has been setting quality assurance standards for college/adult level online courses for some time, but has branched into K-12 online education.  Per the QM website, “Built on research literature and published best practices, the award-winning Quality Matters Program provides a process to ensure quality in online courses through the use of The Grades 6-12 Rubric, course reviews and professional development opportunities for teachers and instructional designers.” http://www.qmprogram.org/grades-6-12

                I took a few courses to become a QM peer reviewer and learned a great deal – and now have a number of changes I want to make in my own courses this summer.  QM focuses on course design – including communications, learning objectives, assessment, instructional materials, interaction between teacher-student/ student-student/ student-course materials, and accessibility.  The QM standards are concrete and measurable, which is helpful when trying to see if your course meets the standards.  Perhaps even more important, the standards are based on research and best practices, rather than plucked out of the air, so they are worth following. 

                The web-based G6-12 Rubric can be used for both blended/hybrid and fully online courses.  Evaluating your own course using these standards is possible (see Improving Your Online course http://www.qmprogram.org/k-12-professional-development-and-trainings ), or your institution can be a QM member. 
               
                The review process is rigorous and thorough – and reminded me of an accreditation review.  If you’ve ever served on an accreditation team or had your institution reviewed for accreditation, you know how useful such a review process can be. 

                Definitely a resource to look into.

Start Here Button

    Recently, I took courses (online, of course) to become a Quality Matters peer reviewer.  (More about that in another post).  One of my classmates there, Mary Wells, talked about having a Start Here Button, a place for students to go for all those beginning-of-course matters – what to do when things go wrong, some information about your teacher, how to navigate the course, and so on.

    I loved the idea and am incorporating it into my courses for next year.  On my sample Moodle course (no student information on it), you can see what this looks like, and one way it can be set up in Moodle.  I put it in its own HTML block at the top, so students will always see it first.  http://tinyurl.com/3wzynwp

    The links in the Start Here block go to documents I stuck in the very last topic for the course.  Thanks to Moodle’s “scroll of death” (= it seems to take forever to get to the bottom), students are unlikely to go down there.  Mary Cooch, Moodle blogger extraordinaire, has come up with a more elegant solution here  http://www.moodleblog.net/?p=24 

    If you don’t already subscribe to Mary’s blog, you should; she is a fount of Moodle wisdom.  http://www.moodleblog.net