Category: CTL

As online courses become increasingly popular, it’s important to ensure that they are designed with quality in mind. That’s where Quality Matters (QM) comes in. QM is a tool and process used to assess the quality of a course. It’s helpful to consider these types of recommendations when designing and developing courses.

What is Quality Matters?

Quality Matters began with a small group of colleagues in the MarylandOnline, Inc. (MOL) consortium trying to solve a common problem among institutions: how do we measure and guarantee the quality of a course? The developers of a set of instructional guidance felt the same and even named it, “Quality Matters”. QM is a nonprofit organization comprised of dedicated staff from all over the United States who work together virtually to support everyone’s quality assurance goals.

How does Quality Matters work?

QM is built on a rubric of course design standards and a replicable peer-review process that can:

• Train and empower faculty to evaluate courses against these standards
• Provide guidance for improving the quality of courses
• Certify the quality of online and blended college courses across institutions

The seventh edition QM Rubric is a set of 8 general standards and 44 specific standards used to evaluate the design of online and blended courses. The Rubric is complete with annotations that explain the application of the standards and the relationship among them. A scoring system and set of online tools facilitate the evaluation by a team of reviewers. The eight general standards are:

• Course overview and introduction
• Learning objectives
• Assessment and measurement
• Instructional materials
• Learning activities and learner interaction
• Course technology
• Learner support
• Accessibility and usability

Why should you use Quality Matters?

QM provides a framework for designing, reviewing, and revising online courses to ensure that they meet research-supported standards of quality. By using QM, you can:

• Ensure that your course meets the needs of your students
• Provide flexible scheduling options
• Offer courses everywhere because geography would no longer be a constraint for enrollment
• Ensure course quality for your students, regardless of where the course originated
• Create quality online courses that are equivalent to traditional face-to-face courses
• Improve student learning outcomes

Conclusion

Quality Matters is an essential tool for online faculty who want to ensure that their courses are designed with quality in mind. By using QM, you can create quality online courses that meet research-based standards of quality and improve student learning outcomes. If you are interested in learning more about QM, visit QM website or contact online@mtu.edu to schedule a meeting with us at CTL.

To strengthen students’ written work, instructors will spend a great deal of time providing detailed feedback in the hopes that students will apply the suggestions to their next written assignment. Unfortunately, many instructors feel that their efforts to provide feedback is being overlooked or not appreciated by the students.

What if an instructor could reduce the burden of providing all the detailed feedback YET increase students engagement in the review process? Maybe even strengthen their writing skills and assessment skills in the process…

Peer Review Assignments

Think about the possibility of having students review each others work and provide each other feedback. If you read through the body of literature, you will find many supporting arguments which state that peer review in the feedback process provides many benefits to students learning.

Benefits of Peer Review

• Ability to become more aware of alternative perspectives on a topic.
• Lifelong learning skills in how to effectively assess another person’s work.
• Building self-assessment of their work by benchmarking themselves against their peers.
• Critical thinking and diplomacy skills.

Canvas Peer Review Assignments

A Canvas Peer Review Assignment allows students to provide feedback on another student’s assignment submission. Setting up an assignment for peer review is fairly simple within Canvas. One of the options when setting up a new assignment is to designate it as a Peer Review assignment. You can select to manually or automatically assign the peer reviews. There is an option to set up the peer reviews to be anonymous or you can include a rubric for the reviewer to complete as the peer review. Peer reviews can not be used with External Tool Assignments.

Students will see a list of peer reviews assigned to them within the assignment. Based on how the assignment submission is designated, the student could annotate the document, add a comment in the comment field or complete the included rubric. A student reviewing another student’s assignment would need to leave at least one comment in order for the review to be considered complete.

Students will see their peers’ reviews in the right sidebar of the Canvas course under Recent Feedback. A student can simply click on the assignment title to access the feedback.

Thanks to a generous gift from William G. Jackson, the testing center was established in conjunction with the Center for Teaching and Learning. A server room and office space in the center of the library were renovated to make three private and seven quiet spaces for testing. 

Opening in the Fall of 2013, the Testing Center was started to assist students with accommodations. Prior to that, students were left in classrooms, put into conference rooms or even instructor’s offices. 

Today, the Testing Center uses a software specifically designed for Testing Centers called RegisterBlast. RegisterBlast tracks time allotments for each different exam, the available seating and hours of the Testing Center, specific instructions and accommodations for different students. There are a huge number of variables to track, using this software helps keep it all straight.  

Find more information and instructional videos, see our website. Scheduling Procedures | Michigan Tech Testing Center | Michigan Tech (mtu.edu)

In the 10 years the Michigan Tech Testing Center has been serving our community, over 45,000 Michigan Tech exams and almost 3,000 sponsored exams have been given.

The Michigan Tech Testing Center offers many things to help the students with their testing session. Of course we have lockers for students to put away their belongings, and have items that they can borrow, such as calculators, rulers, pencils, scratch paper, noise canceling headphones or ear plugs. We have desks with computers and desks with electrical outlets, if either are needed. 

Let us help you and the students with testing needs.

Have you ever considered a different format for your assignments? How about having students create an explanatory video of how they analyze and stepped through a homework problem? Or it could be a short video of them applying a course concept in their daily life. Have you thought about offering a video assignments that involve opportunities to practice professional communication skills, project management skills or a practice presentation. Did you know that students can provide a video response to a discussion thread?

Benefits of video assignments

There are many ways to incorporate a video assignment/response into your course content but you may be wondering what benefit(s) does a video assignment provide over the previous written assignment you had originally assigned? The most significant benefit noted by researchers is that students find video assignments to be more beneficial to their own understanding and mastery of the content. By creating a video, it provides students with an opportunities to practice and demonstrate course concepts. This often involves writing out a script, practicing their response or gaining additional information on the topic before creating the video.

Creating a video assignment in Canvas

You will want to begin by creating a Huskycast student assignment folder. Creating this folder will give students access to record and upload video. Once that is complete, you can now go ahead and create the Canvas Video Assignment. Since students may not be familiar with how to create or upload a video assignment in Canvas, you will want to be sure to provide some guidelines on submitting a video assignment.

After students have submitted their video assignment, the instructor can navigate to the assignment in Canvas and click on Speedgrader. Each submitted video will be embedded on the student’s Speedgrader page. The instructor can review the video, add comments and a score.

Other video response opportunities

You may also want to consider other opportunities for a student to provide a short media response. Maybe there is an opportunity in a discussion or an announcement for a student to provide a short media response.? The Rich Content Editor (available on Announcements, Assignments, Discussions, Pages and Quizzes) allows students to record or upload a short video and/or audio media. Video and audio uploads to Canvas can be up to 500 MB. Media recording submissions are not downloadable.

Additional guidance on video assignments

Not sure where to start with incorporating videos assignments into your course content? Or maybe you have some questions about setting up the assignments….if so, feel free to reach out to elearning@mtu.edu or contact the CTL at 7-3000.

The CTL online team has developed a course design template for face-to-face courses. The course design template will provide you with a solid foundation for good and effective course design. 

Importing the course design template into your course

Step one: Log into MTU Canvas, then click on this link to access  the MTU F2F Course Design Template (If the link does not work, you can Log into MTU Canvas,  click the Commons tab on the black global menu at the left side, and search “MTU F2F”, you will see the MTU F2F Course Design Template). 

Step Two: Click on the template course, click the Import/Download button on the right side of the page, select the course you want to import the template into, and then click Import into course. The template will be imported into your course in a few minutes.

Now you can start to work on your course based on the template. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact CTL online team via online@mtu.edu.