Wrapping Our Heads Around Expiring Quality Designations of Online Course Reviews

Concurrent Session 8

Session Materials

Brief Abstract

Select institutions have incorporated online course reviews for purposes of quality assurance. While there is a lot of discussion around reviewing an initial designation, there has been less conversation around expiring designations. This session is intended to spark a conversation with peers who may be facing these same challenges.

Presenters

Lead Presenter: Nicole Stahl, University of Central Florida

Nicole Stahl received her Master’s in Instructional Design & Technology at the University of Central Florida, as well as a BA in English Literature. In 2013 she joined the Webcourses@UCF Support team at the Center for Distributed Learning as a technical support assistant. After six years, she transitioned to the Pegasus Innovation Lab (iLab) to serve as the project coordinator where her primary focus is to support the iLab’s strategic initiatives.

Co-presenter: Roslyn Miller, University of Central Florida

Roslyn Miller is an instructional designer at the University of Central Florida with more than 20 years' experience as an educator in public, private, military, and university settings. She holds a BA in mathematics from Harding University, an MS in secondary education from Mississippi State University, and a PhD in curriculum and instruction from Mississippi State University. Roslyn specializes in quality course design, assessment, and STEM education.

Extended Abstract

   The state of Florida has been dedicated to assuring quality online learning throughout its universities and colleges. Its 2025 Strategic Plan for Online Education was created with the intention to have all institutions in the State University System (SUS) of Florida develop a quality certification process for online courses. It was decided by the state that once a designation has been earned, the designation would be valid for five years. For institutions that have been working on quality for the past five years, this in turn means that any quality designations earned may soon be expiring, if not already, and will need established expiration practices. While many conferences and webinars have provided discussion about how to implement a quality review process or how to effectively conduct quality reviews for their faculty, discussions about the processes for expiring designation has not been as rich. 

     In this discovery session, we would like to discuss with the community how our institution is approaching the expiration process for Quality and High Quality designations that will be expiring at the five-year mark starting this year. By sharing our processes on tackling this situation, we would like to allow the community an opportunity to share suggestions and ask questions in regards to how their institutions are addressing expiration or where to begin on starting their own expiration process. 

     Our institution does not utilize Quality Matters but rather developed its own Quality review process in 2017. Our items and processes are recognized by the state as being equivalent to Quality Matters besides the external reviewer. For this reason, we also needed to develop our own process to handle Quality and High Quality designations that would begin to expire in summer 2022. During this session, we intend to briefly describe how our Quality processes were created and are currently handled at our institution, including data on current totals of Quality and High Quality online and blended designations. The data will serve as a segue into our timeline for when we started working on our processes in regards to when our Quality Online designations started expiring. We will share how we began our evaluation process, what our processes are in regards to expiration and why they were created in that manner, how we supported our instructional designers with this process, and our initial pilot to ensure our updates were working as intended. We will also discuss our future plans and next steps in regards to how we will continue to support our instructional designers, along with additional updates and pilots for High Quality Online, Quality Blended, and High Quality Blended. Finally, we will provide an opportunity for participants to share their plans and experiences and ask additional questions they may have about expiration, especially in regards to their own institutions.