Penny Ralston-Berg (PennState) and Bethany Simunich (Director of Research & Innovation, QM) presented last October about the Quality Matters (QM) rubric. The session entitled “QM Balloon Animals: Twisting the Rubric to Meet Your Needs” and relates to the workshop I did this morning in which we did self-reviews.
Simunich explained that the QM Rubric can be used for faculty development through site licenses, faculty development workshops, and course improvement. Ralston-Berg talked about informal and formal reviews at PennState. It seems to me that learning how to be a reviewer is powerful, as today I heard from two different perspectives how the training process helped them be better teachers and instructional designers. Ralston-Berg showed a flowchart with several self-review and informa/formal reviews during the design, development, and improvement of courses. They also mentioned how the rubric can be used to design and revise courses in a new program to set standards and meet quality assurance checks. Ralston-Berg mentioned “design with the QM Rubric in mind” and create checklists that can scale. I wish we could implement something like this in our program! Importantly, Ralston-Berg talked about data-informed revisions of courses in a program using QM Standards.
A full review looks at the 8 general standards, 42 specific review standards, and has a maximum of 100 points. Ralston-Berg explained that at PennState they have a large population of designers that volunteer to be on internal review teams with three reviewers (mix of instructional designers and faculty). They have three cycles a year. Ralston-Berg discussed the specifics of the process and timeline for different cases. Simunich mentioned that there is a rubric that was created to move from remote instruction to quality online learning: the Bridge to Quality Design Guide that is freely available. We should consider this guide to design our online modules. Further, Simunich mentioned they are including culturally inclusive elements to the guide soon. Simunich mentioned that the rubric is flexible and adaptable to different uses. They mentioned several key considerations about the rubric:
- that the annotations provide many ways to meet the QM Standards,
- the rubric is focused on application/engagement and presence/interaction, the rubric is technology and LMS agnostic, and
- there is a difference between meeting standards and standardization.
They also talked about QM Essentials: 8 General standards, 23 Specific Review Standards, and 3-point scale. The My Custom Reviews feature in my QM also provides another option for self-review. One suggestion Simunich mentioned was customizing for a subset of standards to create a syllabus check/guide. I like this! I wonder if this could be done for our program. Another valuable idea was to create an alignment check that focuses on 5 general standards and 6 specific review standards. The discussion about using the Rubric for alternative approaches and policies, including ungrading, made me think and realize how QM can be used as a guide for problem-based learning (PBL), experiential learning, and student constructed learning objectives, for example. I want to keep this in mind as we develop and redesign courses.
