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One of the most important pieces that quality matters offers is course
organization and orientation
so as soon as a student comes into your course they understand what they need to
know they understand where to get the information. They also understand these
key learning objectives. QM helped me tremendously
not just for my online classes but in any course
in general
because the concept of alignment where you have to align your
course materials
your learning activities, tools, and the assessment back to your
course outcome and learning objectives. That was really an eye-opener for me that you know you can
proactively decide
that for your students.
In the past it was all in my head
you know I knew what I wanted them to do but I didn't tell them in the syllabus and now
uh... Quality Matters has made it
apparent to me that you really need to do that, you need to give them
that roadmap in a
much more detailed sense than I did in the past.
One of the nice things about quality matters is it gives us kind of a frame work
here are the general, kind of
navigational tools to have in a course so that
the first day
when our students go into a course
now they'll know where everything is
and they won't be spending time being frustrated with kind of the process of online learning and can get straight in to the
content
and feel confident about the course.
I've been designing my courses very much kind of from my perspective of
here's all the information I need from the course
but seeing it in a modular format from
somebody else really showed me how to make the content in a way that was intuitive for
students.
I think sometimes when professors design their courses online
we do it over and over again so everything seems obvious to me, you know like
well obviously you click on this button to go here and get that, and it's, uh
by going through the Quality Matters training and looking at
other examples of
courses I realized oh
if you were hitting this course for the first time it's actually not obvious where you go.
I've had really
very few emails about accessing finding information having it all in one spot creating the
five modules that work for our course design. Quality Matters was so much help for me
as a teacher online
because you really showing me the support and the collaborative work you can
have among faculty and teachers
for the benefit of the students.
By using these tools
we actually have improved our face to face courses
and so we're now transitioning the learning that we've um,
received out of quality matters from that environment into the face to face classroom.
Quality Matters has really helped me as a new adjunct here at CECH.
I felt confident
in face to face instruction but I wasn't sure how to transition that into online
and it has given me
all of the information and support
to feel confident in providing a quality course for my students.
So now, as I go to redesign
my next course I have so much better understanding of what
to incorperate. So, if anybody who
is looking into teaching an online course I would definitely
encourage you to put Quality Matters training into your to-do list.