In 2008, DePaul adopted QualityMatters (QM) as the quality standard for online and hybrid courses developed through the DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program. During the past eight years, nearly two hundred courses have been through the QM internal review process at DePaul.  Since 2011 when the first instructor was rewarded with a QM star for developing a course that met all of the QM standards, the number of QM star recipients has increased drastically.  These days, becoming a QM star has become a common expectation of all faculty participants of DOTS.

As designers, we are pleased by the numbers and the feeling of “getting a hang of QM”; on the other hand, we ask whether this is the place where we want to be – because that pounding question remains loud and sound: Does QM guarantee a successful learning experience for students?

The answer is no. Over the years, we’ve seen courses that were perfectly scored during the QM review that ended up not achieving the goal of making students learn.  While responding to the confounded deans or chairs, we keep reminding ourselves: QualityMatters doesn’t address teaching; it only evaluates course design.  We hope that like course designers, the administrators will understand that there is a difference between designing a course and teaching it. The difference is that good teaching may pull up a course with design flaws, but there is no design that can remedy poor instruction.

To blend in the assessment of the teaching aspects of online and hybrid courses, DePaul initiated the effort of identifying pedagogically distinctive features that encompass not only meaningful design but also effective teaching.  Over the past two years, the office of Academic Affairs worked with Faculty Instructional Technology Services (FITS) in gathering input from both faculty and instructional designers. The result is the following three standards that represent the pedagogically distinctive features or PDF of online learning at DePaul:

Rich Student Experience due to High Degree of Personal Engagement

You may find some indication of this feature in QM Standard #5 for course activities and learner interaction, but the PDF goes beyond the build-in of interactive assignments; it requires the students to have a high-degree of engagement with the content, the instructor, and/or their peers.  The high degree of personal engagement can be evidenced by using student-generated content, games and simulations, peer review, progress indicator, or self-assessment.

For example, Dr. Rajul Jain, a professor from the College of Communication at DePaul, decided to make her Public Relation class a place “where students are not only consumers of knowledge but are also creators.” In her online International Public Relation class, Dr. Jain has students team up to conduct interviews with public relations practitioners.  Each week, one or more interviews are conducted using an interview guide provided by Dr. Jain that reflects the topic of the week.  The teams post these interviews for the class to review at the beginning of the week. By the end of the week, students participate in a VoiceThread discussion board answering questions from the prompt provided by the instructor. Through these weekly interviews with public relations practitioners, her students generate a dialogue with one another so that they not only develop conceptual understanding of the topics, but also see their practical applications.

A High Level of Instructor Presence and Student-Instructor Interaction

A course with this second distinctive feature will demonstrate a high level of instructor presence which is evidenced by timely feedback to students, weekly recaps of learning, or just-in-time teaching. The instructor creates opportunities to assess student progress and intervene with personalized feedback and guidance. Students’ interaction with and feedback from the instructor is richer and more frequent.

Dr. Lucy Lu, professor of the College of Communication at DePaul provides weekly summary of online discussion for her hybrid History of Rhetoric and Communication class.  As you can see from the screenshot below, what Dr. Lu offered to the students is not just an answer to the question or a summary of key points.  After reading and analyzing each of her students’ posts, Dr. Lu presented a synthesized report where she identified themes merged throughout the discussion. Her mentioning of the student names not only captured student’s attention but also send a strong message to them: your instructor values your input and sees the progress you are making in this learning process.

Chicago and the World as the Classroom

The third pedagogically distinctive feature addresses connections with the world, the city, or the life in present day.  It requires using the digital environment to facilitate the use of local and global resources to enrich courses.  This PDF can be achieved by integrating current affairs, service learning, or input from experts and peers worldwide into the course experience.

In Dr. Jain’s International Public Relation class, she brought in PR practitioners to share national and global perspectives of the industry.  In Dr. Lu’s Rhetoric and Communication class, students use rhetoric and communication theories to analyze the ongoing presidential campaign.  Both instructors strived to bring a sense of connection, applicability, and significance into the classes.  By doing this, they both raised the bar of learning to a higher level of the bloom’s taxonomy that enables students to apply, to analyze, to synthesize, and to evaluate.

Two years ago, I wrote a blog called From Content Critical to Content Cheap: the Change of Online Course Value where I tried to position the three elements of a course in Olympic ranking – presentation being the bronze, content being the sliver, and interaction, the gold. While a template may convert a plain document into a glamour web page and materials may be easily searched and adapted from the Internet, there is no replacement for a high-level and in-depth interaction which can only be carried out by an instructor.

With the goal of bringing the gold into learning, a new course review rubric will be introduced to DePaul faculty in spring 2016.  It is called QM+ which signifies a combination of QM elements and the three “+” features to make online learning pedagogically distinctive at DePaul.