– Hi, I’m Lorri Barnett. I am the Senior Director of Professional Development for Quality Matters, which is based in the United States. Quality Matters is a research-based framework for designing high-quality online and hybrid courses, and the activities in this session use QM principles to strengthen alignment, clarity, and student success. I am also an adjunct faculty for Purdue Polytechnic in West Lafayette, Indiana, which is considered the Midwestern part of the United States.

In this activity, we’ll do a 10-minute quality check, which is focused on outcomes, clarity, visible alignment, and navigation and support. This idea came from the first week of a class that I teach in where I was flooded with identical emails. Where do I start? What counts as the first week? I thought I was being clear, but my course design told a different story. We are going to use the simple checklist inspired by QM standards to scan the first one to two weeks of your course. You don’t need a full redesign, just 10 minutes of focused attention. This activity gives faculty a quick, low-barrier way to spot high-impact design issues in the first one or two weeks, which are heavily weighted in QM under course overview and introduction, learning objectives, assessment, and learner support. These happen to be QM’s General Standards one, two, three, seven, and eight. Early clarity about outcomes, alignment, navigation, and support will reduce the confusion and the repeated where do I start emails, which is exactly what QM emphasizes under navigation, grading information, and support visibility.

So the purpose of our 10-minute quality check checklist is that you only have 10 minutes to improve a course. It is designed around three practical checks, ensuring your learning outcomes are clear, confirming your visible alignment between activities and outcomes, and reviewing navigation and learner support in the first part of your course. The QM connection is that this 10-minute quality check is grounded in our higher education rubric and is designed to help faculty make quick, practical improvements in course clarity and student experience. It especially draws on our General Standard One, which is our course overview and introduction, General Standard Two, which is our learning objectives, which is competencies, and our General Standard Three, which is around assessment, measurement, General Standard Seven is learner support, and General Standard Eight is accessibility and usability. Before you begin, you should open a course inside your learning management system and look at your first one to two weeks of your outline.

So we’re going to look at the worksheet and along the left side, I have identified some areas for you to check, and then what you see when you do that check visually, how they connect to our standards, and are there any revisions that are needed? This happened to be, for me, a course called Introduction to Business Communication. This is an example that I’m showing you for my own content, and this happened to be my first one to two weeks as demonstrated for students inside the course. This is that instance where in the first week, I was receiving a bunch of emails from students, where do I begin? Where are things located? What does the flow look like? Are there discussions? How am I graded? And that was my clue to take a look at this alignment and to do my checks in order to provide more succinct information to my students. So the first area was outcomes clarity. And if you can see my Module One said to understand workplace communication, but I did not tell students what they should be doing by the end of the module. So I told them what we were gonna do, but I didn’t tell them what we hope to accomplish at the end of that module one. When I aligned that to our rubric, that told me in General Standard Two that I needed to have measurable and stated unit learning objectives included in that section. So what I was required to do there was to rewrite my outcomes and to make those measurable. And I use student facing language such as analyze workplace emails for audience tone and purpose, and really drove home exactly what we were gonna look at together inside the course.

The next thing I looked at was on the check area was the visible alignment. And that was where students were to complete a discussion post and a quiz in week one, but I did not explain in either of those activities how it connected to those objectives that are so, so important. That aligns to our General Standard 2.4, and that was adding a sentence to each of my activities that helped them understand exactly what it was going to help them do by going through this discussion activity. So what I added to each of those was this discussion helps you practice analyzing communication choices, which supports the module objective.

The third check that I looked at was my grading clarity. The discussion post again, I told them to post a thoughtful response. There again, I left out the rubric or the criteria explaining what the word thoughtful means. And so that aligns to our QM General Standard Three, specifically 3.3. So what I was able to do was go into the learning management module and add a short rubric. And what I did to the rubric was I added criteria such as relevance, use of examples, analysis, and then, of course, that interaction with peers that’s so important.

My getting started was another visual check that I did. They landed in the course and they see the announcement that says ‘Welcome to Business Communication’, but there was no clear starting point. So that aligns to our Quality Matters General Standard One. And what I did was created a page that says start here. Inside that start here is where I then put the Welcome, the First Steps, the Getting Started, the structure and the syllabus. And the start here was done in a way that was highlighted. It was large and there was no way that students could not get started without clicking on that element first. And that was a great way to help incorporate that.

‘Support’ and ‘Help’ was the next area that I looked at with my visual check. And I noticed that my contact information was inside the syllabus, which was a Word document, but the technical help for our IT and LMS support, as well as my digital contact information was missing. That was not located inside the learning management modules. That aligns to our Quality Matters General Standard Seven. So what I did was add a ‘Help and Support’ page. And I had a module that linked them directly to technical support if they needed it, how to get tutoring support and accessibility services should they need that. So it actually became a Student Services page that linked them to all of those resources that I thought they might find most helpful.

And then finally, I looked at the navigation. The navigation in my week one materials were across several folders. And it seemed to be very hard with several clicks for students to have to find all of the various files that I needed them to refer to, to the readings that I had. And my naming conventions were also a little bit off and not consistent. So that aligns to Quality Matters General Standard 8.1. And what I did was reorganize my content. So everything is now in a weekly module. I have subsections that say Read, Act, Do. And inside of each of those subsections, the content is organized, it is labeled consistently, and it provides the same overview for readings, activities, assessments and support that I want them to have. At the bottom of this worksheet are just a summary of our general standards that are impacted by this worksheet that I thought you would find very helpful in understanding the alignment and what is so important in making your first two weeks of your content accessible to students in a way that’s meaningful and easy for them to navigate.

If anybody is interested in more information on our Quality Matters Higher Education rubric, please reach out to [email protected] and someone will be happy to assist you. Thanks for working through this activity with me. If you found it helpful, I encourage you to complete the worksheet for one course that you’re teaching now and notice what changes for your students. OneHE has more micro learning resources and Quality Matters offers deep frameworks and peer review to support your ongoing course design work. The resources to this worksheet are located below this video.