Creating and Implementing Faculty Online Teaching Standards: Our Journey

This is the USDLA 2014 session that I presented yesterday. I shared our three year journey of merging two universities, revising existing standards, and rebuilding an online course approval process into an online course review process. I told our story – and invited participants to share their stories as well.

I found three points interesting from our conversations:

  1. We are not the only ones creating our own standards, but comparing them to other standard systems to improve, evaluate, and reaffirm our choices. That was interesting and energizing for me to learn.
  2. Participants most appreciated our concept of the 20% survey that just checks how things are going about 3 weeks into a semester long class. We use it as feedback for the instructor, but also for our team to intervene if there are major unreported technical difficulties.
  3. Several people also commented that they appreciated how we are collecting data and making connections (alignment and data collection) between our standards and student evaluations of teaching. No one else in the room was doing that. I want to investigate further what other research is being done on online teaching standards and student evaluations of teaching.

Since we are now reviewing our process, it might be good to present on this topic again next year and share what happened with our revisions.

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