The Quality Matters™ Program is a research-centered approach to quality assurance and continuous improvement for online learning. The primary components are a set of standards (or Rubric) for the design of online courses and the online components of blended courses, a peer review process for applying these standards, and related professional development for faculty.
The Quality Matters Rubric is based on recognized best practices, built on the expertise of instructional designers and experienced online teachers, and supported by distance education literature and research. The goal of the program is to enable faculty to increase student engagement, learning, and satisfaction in online courses by implementing better course design.
The Quality Matters Program is used at EIU for online course design guidelines and online course reviews.
EIU instructors can use the Quality Matters’s Self-Review tool to benchmark their course against the QM Rubric and see if it meets QM Standards. QM members can find this tool in the Course Review Management System in MyQM.
FREE for EIU instructors, these one-hour webinars are offered monthly to provide a forum for learning how member institutions implement and build on the QM quality assurance model. Recordings — presented by QM Members for QM Members — can also be accessed in MyQM.
For more information about Quality Matters at EIU, contact the Director of Learning Innovation, Julie Lockett, at jalockett@eiu.edu.