This session explores how high-tech and low-tech strategies impact student belonging in synchronous online courses. Using Rovai’s Classroom Community Scale, findings reveal how virtual environments and pedagogical techniques shape community. Key takeaways include reasons why community matters, common barriers, and scalable strategies to foster connection in any online class. Participants will leave with a framework for applying personalized, community-building interventions.
Looking to launch or enhance an online program with built-in quality assurance? Join us to explore a practical framework, applicable to online programs, and leave with a toolkit to guide your faculty and course development teams from kickoff to launch. Learn how Digital Learning and Academic Innovations team collaborated with faculty to align with QM Standards, support faculty development, and ensure consistent course quality.
Explore how AI can support scalable, human-centered course review. In this hands-on session, you'll test a custom ChatGPT tool that evaluates course modules using QM Standards. Compare its feedback to your own and leave with practical ideas. Bring a ChatGPT account and course materials (e.g., syllabus, objectives, content) to get personalized feedback.
How can we help our learners grow into evaluators, collaborators, and reflective practitioners? Explore strategies for peer feedback, assignment choice, and targeted reflection to drive student agency and evaluative thinking. Each approach emphasizes metacognitive practices for both students and faculty—supporting reflection on achieving course outcomes and related industry standards, and informing continuous course improvement. Participants will see examples and get resources for implementation. Leave with focused strategies for creating high-agency, learner-centered courses.
Explore how a business capstone course uses real-world, experiential assessments—like simulations, case analyses, and role plays—to drive engagement in online learning. This active session includes visual examples, collaborative design, and guided reflection to help you adapt these strategies to your own course. Walk away with at least one specific assessment change and practical tools to enhance student motivation and application of course concepts.
Discover how a strategic building block approach—where each criterion within the four QM Program Certifications is tackled through an iterative, scaffolded process—can enhance online degree programs. This session explores how institutions can move from basic to advanced practices by gradually aligning operations to certification requirements. You’ll walk away with examples, tools, and an action plan to apply this iterative model at your institution.
We really did it! With the help of QM, we developed an online course design process and an online faculty mentoring program, which have enabled us to reduce student failure rates by half! We’ll share what we changed, how our online course design process works, and how we are mentoring online faculty. We’ll also share how our small, but mighty, instructional design team has created/redesigned over 350 online courses in the past 6 years (and lived to tell the tale).
Discover how one district reimagined faculty professional development by embedding instructional design best practices—without the jargon. Learn how workshops modeled quality teaching principles through hands-on, reflective experiences, boosting engagement and confidence among faculty. This session shares practical strategies for fostering meaningful growth by focusing on experience over imposition.
This session explores how a course design team, working without an institutional mandate, transformed a static course review process and accompanying rubric into a living model of continuous improvement while ensuring transparency, integrating stakeholder feedback, encouraging collaboration, and evolving the process through predetermined revision cycles. Attendees will leave with a framework and practical strategies for applying similar innovations in their own institutions.
Explore how one curriculum team built a shared culture of quality by aligning an internal eCourse Style Guide to QM and NSQ standards. Hear how ongoing PD and cross-functional collaboration support scalable course quality, then join a discussion on practical ways to champion QM practices in your own organization.
