Quality Matters Certified

Ah, good news. My general education course, ENGL 160D: Nonhuman Subjects: Monsters, Ghosts, Aliens, and Others, has now been designated as meeting Quality Matters Internal Review Standards for online course design excellence. I don't get nothing for it, but it's a nice little perk.

The designation is also a total bear to get -- besides doing a two-week online training earlier this summer on how to apply the QM rubric, the rubric is just a bastard to actually apply. There's 42 criteria, many of them involving "aligning" your course content with course-level and module-level Student Learning Outcomes, and much of it is admin-centered rather than student-centered. (That is, students never care or read these SLOs, but they're useful from an admin perspective.) If you miss even one of the essential criteria, you have to revise the course. Luckily, despite a 25-page review document, I only missed one of the 42 criteria, so revision wasn't that bad. All in all, my course got 81 points out of a possible 81 points -- a perfect score.

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