Today Quality Matters is a nonprofit organization comprised of a dedicated staff that works together virtually-from cities all over the United States-to support everyone’s quality assurance goals. Through annual member subscriptions and fee-for-service offerings, QM continues to support research, expand its offerings, and cultivate a community of professionals who are dedicated to quality assurance in online learning. In 2014 Quality Matters began operating as a standalone nonprofit organization to broaden our reach worldwide, build new partnerships, and take on a greater leadership role as we continue to champion quality assurance in online learning and provide the gold standard for certifying the quality of online courses and programs. As a result, we expanded QM’s quality assurance tools and professional development to include organizations outside of the Higher Education sector, including K-12, continuing and professional education, course publishers, and education service providers. While QM could have been just another bound report on a shelf somewhere, everyone saw the the positive impact of the QM Rubric and peer review process. Developing a Scalable Quality Assurance System for the Future We had also trained more than 60,000 education professionals on online course design standards, and certified thousands of online and blended courses. In the years that followed, more than 1500 colleges and universities throughout the world joined the QM community and used the HE Rubric to improve course design. An Internationally-Recognized Program with Broad AppealĪlthough the FIPSE grant ended in 2006, QM persisted as a self-sustaining program within MOL and was used to impact the quality of teaching and learning at a state and national level. By the end of the three-year grant period, we had trained 694 peer reviewers from 154 institutions in 28 states, and we had conducted more than 100 course reviews. Certify the quality of online and blended college courses across institutionsĪs word spread that there was now a tool for assuring quality across courses, more institutions became interested and involved in the QM process.Provide guidance for improving the quality of courses.Train and empower faculty to evaluate courses against these standards.The FIPSE grant enabled QM to develop a rubric of course design standards and create a replicable peer-review process that would: The QM Process and Community Build Momentum In 2003 MOL outlined how the Quality Matters program could create a scalable process for course quality assurance, and applied for a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grant from the U.S. They needed a way to ensure course quality - that courses would be equivalent - for their students, regardless of where the course originated. (MOL) consortium who were trying to solve a common problem among institutions: how do we measure and guarantee the quality of a course? This question was especially important as institutions began to create a system where they could share available seats in their online courses with other institutions. Quality Matters began with a small group of colleagues in the MarylandOnline, Inc.
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