Friday, February 21, 2014

Quality Matters is Cool

The university that I work at just purchased an institutional membership to the Quality Matters (QM) Program.  If you are not familiar with QM, it's basically a quality assurance program for online courses that is faculty-centered, grounded in research and rubric-based.

As someone who has been working in online education for a dozen years, I am excited!  I quickly registered for and completed their first foundational workshop called: Applying the QM Rubric (APPQMR).  It was a great.  It is a 2-week asynchronous workshop that is very task oriented.  The eight modules walk participants through using the QM Rubric by assigning a variety of tasks including giving feedback on an actual online course that went through the QM Review process.  It was a very nice learning opportunity because some activities centered around examining the sample online course before it went to review, while other activities asked participants to comment on improvements that were found in the same sample course after it was reviewed, etc.  The workshop is discounted from $300 to $200/person since my university is an institutional member.  However, it's well worth the $300 even if your university doesn't participate.  As advertised, I can confirm that it takes about 8-10hrs/week to completed so make sure you block time in your schedule if you choose to do this workshop. I enjoyed the training so much, I’ll be moving to the next level and completing the training to become a Certified QM Peer Reviewer.

If you need more information on the Higher Education Professional Development Opportunities for QM, you can find it here.

If you have any questions, let me know with a comment below.

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