Faculty Can Learn How Best to Design Online Courses at Workshop

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Participating University of Arkansas faculty and instructors will enhance their skills in designing online courses that meet the university’s high academic standards and follow national guidelines through participation in a Quality Matters Program workshop from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, March 12.

The Global Campus will bring Rhonda Spells, a Quality Matters instructor, to its 2 E. Center St. site on the downtown Fayetteville square, Room 402. Seating is limited to 25 participants. Contact the Global Campus instructional design team at online@uark.edu by Tuesday, March 10, to reserve seats. Lunch will be provided.

“Faculty walk away from this workshop with a rubric and step-by-step instructions for designing online courses that are academically robust and facilitate student learning and interaction,” said Miran Kang, director of instructional design and support services at the Global Campus. “The end result will be better student outcomes.”

The Global Campus hosts the faculty-centered Quality Matters workshops each spring and fall to provide faculty with the tools needed to enhance and innovate online learning and teaching.

The “Applying the QM Rubric” workshop is Quality Matter’s flagship workshop. Quality Matters, a non-profit program of Maryland Online Inc., is a leader in quality assurance for online education in the United States. This program is nationally recognized for its continuous contributions to the improvement of online education. Quality Matters develops and disseminates rubrics for the effective design of online and blended courses, based on research findings on effective online learning and best practices advocated by leading distance learning organizations.

The Quality Matters rubric guides instructors to align the activities and assessments with the learning objectives and to promote student-student, student-content, and student-faculty interactions.  It also helps faculty organize the course in a way that enables students to spend more time learning the material and less time trying to navigate the course pages. Designing quality courses ensures that online students will receive learning opportunities and interactions that can engage students as effectively as face-to-face classes on campus.

Participants who complete the March 12 workshop will be eligible to enroll in another Quality Matters program that would allow them to become national peer reviewers in the Quality Matters certification process. Peer reviewers must have experience teaching online and complete a two-week online program. For information about becoming a peer reviewer, contact the instructional design and support services team at online@uark.edu.

Providing access to Quality Matters workshops is one way the Global Campus supports academic colleges and schools in the development and delivery of high-quality online degree programs and courses. The Global Campus provides instructional design services, technology services, access to national distance education organizations, and assistance with strategic academic program development and marketing. Online programs and courses are showcased on the University of Arkansas ONLINE website.