Week 5: Quality Assurance

You can read my blog entry/reading reaction for this week’s reading.

You spent months preparing this blended course. You made sure your objectives align with the activities and assessments, you recorded your lectures, and you made sure that the online and face-to-face portions of the course are well integrated. The course may make sense to you, but does it make sense to your students? Do all the links and videos work? How about the navigation?

To ensure you have a quality course, it helps to take some time prior to course launch to verify everything works and makes logical sense. Perhaps you changed an assignment but forgot to update the corresponding objective. Or maybe your Syllabus still makes reference to assignments or topics that you removed from the course. During the course, it also helps to make sure you keep track of any issues students experience, so that you can make revisions for the next iteration of the course.

The Peer Review Form and Course Implementation Checklist below will both help in this regard. The Peer Review Form may be used as a self-check or with a trusted colleague to verify the integrity of the course, while the Checklist will serve as a to-list of items to complete before, during, and after the course launches. The main changes I incorporated into the Checklist included:

• Before Course Launch
  • Recording video lectures
  • Separating out time-consuming tasks such as creating quizzes
  • Making time to conduct a self-check (1.5 months before course launch), as well as a peer review from a trusted colleague (1 month before course launch)
• During the Course
  • I wanted to set myself a minimum threshold for announcements. In my face-to-face course, I send out on average 3-4 announcements per week, even though I saw the students twice in one week. For my online course, I always sent out reminders for assignments, clarifications on things, etc. at least three or four times per week. So for my first blended course, I wanted to ensure I sent out at least an announcement at the start of each week summarizing the prior week’s work, as well as what work is coming up.

 

 

 

 
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