Assuring Quality Online Instruction With a Rubric

Matthew Ensenberger, Managing Partner with Joint Digital, will begin teaching a 2 credit hour graduate level course on Friday, March 12, 2010.  The course is offered through a partnership with Harper College and Aurora University.  The two semester hour course will be taught in a blended format over a period of 5 weeks.  The blend will include face-to-face, online instruction, and a synchronous class component delivered via Elluminate Live!, a synchronous VOIP classroom technology.

This graduate course will help those instructors that have already developed and delivered an online or blended course.  The basis of the course is the Quality Online Course Initiative Rubric or QOCI.  The rubric was developed by a host of two year schools along with the University of Illinois.  The result was a 25 page exhaustive document that allows the user to carefully evaluate a distance-delivered course for overall effectiveness.  "The rubric helps instructors to identify problem areas in their course.  It doesn't evaluate the content, but rather the organization and effectiveness of the content.", Ensenberger stated.