More on the QM Rubric and Who Ows It

Since I am not such a big fan of the QM Rubric process, I was wondering who developed the creature? The Quality Matters Program (QM) is an international organization representing broad inter-institutional collaboration and a shared understanding of online course quality. QM's quality assurance processes have been developed to improve and certify the design of online and blended courses.

There is an an advisory council of 15 (only two of which are actually instructors), and none of the board of directors are instructors. Just what I suspected; that this is not a faculty-driven set of standards, and it sure looks like this idea of online instruction standards has been both institutionalized and corporatized.

Continued Growth in Community College Liberal Arts

Despite all the hand-wringing excessive emphasis on STEM courses, degrees and training, it looks like humanities (probably the social sciences too) courses and degrees continue to hold up well enrollment-wise. See Scott Jaschik, Community College Liberal Arts (20 January 2015).

Digital Assignments: Using Web-Based Tools to Go Beyond Just Writing Papers

My latest presentation was Digital Assignments: Using Web-Based Tools to Go Beyond Just Writing Papers. What I am hoping to do is get more instructors to consider using alternate assignments instead of the tradition read this and write that.

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.

The Corporatization of Higher Education

No, I have not disappeared from the blog scene, although I see that my last post was probably six months ago. Things come up, other projects get in the way of writing on the blogosphere; administrative demands attention, etc.  Right now I'm doing training to be qualified to offer a hybrid course.  Even though I've been teaching at a distance and online for a lot of years now, and even though I taught with the inter-college video system years ago, etc, I still need training. It's one of the features of corporate. bureaucratic education run afire, there is absolutely no trust on the part of the administration re the abilities/capabilities of the professors. Got to submit some paperwork to prove that you know how to do this or that.

We are now drowning in paperwork, committees, meetings, credentialing, testing, student learning outcomes.  It's just a much different environment than it was twenty or thirty years ago.

Trying Out Another MOOC

This one, through Coursera, is titled the History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education.  I like to check these out to see if I get any ideas.  Of course, one of the drawbacks to the MOOC style is the unwieldy use of discussion forums--there is no way that you can really make anything out of the cross-currents in a discussion among thousands of people.

MOOCs, Ipads and Smartphones

Been tinkering with these handheld electronic devices to figure out how I could better design classroom instruction to make use of these.  Agreed, they are great at delivering video.  You could say that they are mini-televisions, and so, you can easily use them to deliver short, important content videos to students in or out of the classroom.  If you want, you can "flip" a class around.

They are less useful for delivering text.  The key is the amount of text.  Tweets, instagrams, posts, short passages of text can be delivered pretty well, but longer, more substantial pieces of text can be problematic.  And since I teach history, that is a problem, since the study of history is so much based on texts.  Even reading digital books doesn't work all that well unless you break up the reading into short segments.

Something that I haven't explored, but it might make sense to use the handheld devices as simple, feedback, assessment tools.  For example, the old "murkiest point" tool, where you have students jot down the thing that they least understand from class today; that might work well in the digital world where they can just text those to you as the instructor.