As a faculty member, you want to make a difference in the lives of your students. You want to teach them relevant topics while offering them a quality education. For faculty teaching online courses, Quality Matters (QM) offers training and certification to help you meet your goal of ensuring the quality of your courses.
What is Quality Matters?
Simply, QM is a collaborative organization that works to help faculty improve their courses through continuous research leading to faculty readiness, learner support, teaching support, and course design.
What can QM do for me as a faculty member?
Quality Matters offers many options for faculty to improve their online courses and access to professional development. At The University of Southern Mississippi, the Office of Online Learning offers workshops that lead to QM certification.
What is the first step for me with QM?
At Southern Miss, after creating your QM membership, the first step for faculty is attending the Applying the Quality Matters Rubric (APPQMR) workshop. This is where you learn how to examine your course through the eyes of a learner and use the QM Rubric to improve your course design.
What can QM do for my career?
QM can help solidify you as a quality online educator. By having your course reviewed and certified by QM, you are showing that your class meets QM quality standards and best practices for online courses.
Who reviews my course if I choose to have it reviewed?
According to QM, there are steps to course review. These include self-review, and internal review. Reviews that lead to QM Certification, are done by QM-Certified Peer Reviewers, collegial partners, who are also instructors of online courses. This certification process includes completion of an application that eventually leads to the review by a Higher Education (HE) review team. This team includes at least one reviewer who is external to the organization submitting the course, at least one reviewer who is a Subject Matter Expert, and a Team Chair who is a QM Master Reviewer.
What does QM offer me in terms of additional information?
By becoming a member, QM offers an online portal for faculty that includes MyQM. Through the MyQM portal, you can access webinars, access the QM reference library, keep track of your QM certifications, and much more. Subscribe and get notification of upcoming opportunities through email.
Where can I learn more?
A great place to learn more about Quality Matters is the QM website. But, the best place to start is at your institution. At Southern Miss, we have embraced QM fully, even going so far as to name a QM Coordinator for our university. We have a dedicated site that focuses on QM and offers faculty information about QM. Check with your institution to see if they have QM on campus.
At The University of Southern Mississippi, we are proud to be members of the Quality Matters family. Learn more about our commitment to quality online education at https://online-learning.usm.edu/quality-matters/.
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