Tuesday, November 25, 2014

QM Rubric and the Standardization of Online Education: some quick thoughts

Boy, do I dislike these checklist that indicate that to be a good online instructor teaching a good online course, you have to do every one of these 82 things.  If you don't do one of them, or if you choose to disagree with the wording of the requirement, then some administrator will claim that you are not eligible to teach online.

There is a lot of leeway, a lot of flexibility with how an individual instructor teaches in the classroom, and there should be some equal flexibility with the way an instructor teaches online.

Some of this might be a matter of taste, for example, how much personal example is used by an instructor in a class.  Another example, might be more teaching-oriented, for example, the use or non-use of certain features of a course management system.

One thing that the QM template seems to do is create monster syllabi.  A syllabus certainly has to be detailed, but there is a point of no return at which point students will no longer read and pay attention.

1 comment:

Professor Charles Evans said...

On the other hand, when you have a couple of hundred faculty offering courses, and those faculty are not al completely trained, then you can have problems.

Ok, think of it this way. When most professors start teaching, they have had little to no training on how to teach. hey may have functioned at teaching assistants, or graders, or course assistants, but no one explained to them how to set goals and objectives and how to devise assessment measures.

It is much the same with online teaching. Most people just end up doing it, and sometimes they end up doing it without even wanting to do it. So, in those cases, it makes sense to apply some kind of standards.