Quality Assurance for blended and online courses

2019-2020 — Cal State LA — QA ePortfolio

Proposal Summary:  This year's project plan includes offering a new in-house Designing Online Courses (DOC) Program.  The DOC program will allow us to scale our hybrid/online course redesign efforts by offering a program that is more flexible, more cost-effective, and supplements our current TECH workshop series.  By using in-house resources, and relying less on QM workshops, we hope these efforts result in a truly sustainable QA program that can scale to meet the campus' needs. 



Campus QA Goals

Campus Goal for Quality Assurance

Over the last 4 years, Cal State LA’s Quality Assurance (QA) efforts have focused on increasing hybrid/blended course offerings. Recently, there has been an emerging interest in the creation of fully online courses. To meet this need, this year’s QA efforts focus on the following:  

  • Develop and offer a new Designing Online Courses (DOC) program
  • Offering incentives to encourage informal course review and QM formal review

Quality Assurance Lead

  • Beverly Bondad-Brown, Ph.D. — Director of Academic Technology

Supporting Campus Partners

Center for Effective Teaching and Learning (CETL) staff:

  • Catherine Haras, Senior Director of CETL
  • Jeff Suarez-Grant, Senior Instructional Designer
  • Owynn Lancaster, Instructional Designer
  • Naat Jairam, Instructional Designer

Campus Commitment Toward Sustainability of QA Efforts

  • Use of CETL space for related QA workshops
  • Use of CETL instructional design staff for the development and facilitation of all DOC workshops
  • Use of CETL instructional design staff and QA lead for informal peer reivew process
  • Use of QA lead to facilitate on-campus IYOC workshops
  • Funding for two "Alignment Seminars" as part of the DOC program.  This seminar consisted of 3 fully online modules that are a part of the Association of College and University Educators' (ACUE) certificate in effective teaching practices

Summary of Previous QA  Accomplishments

In the 2018-2019 year we accomplished the following:

  • 17 faculty participated in CETL's Online Development Program
  • 36 QA training sessions completed
  • 68 faculty completed CETL's TECH certificate (6 workshops)
  • 425 faculty completed "Getting Started with Canvas" workshop through Moodle to Canvas conversion 

Dissemination of QA Efforts— Conferences 

The following conferences and presentations have been opportunities to share QA-related information and/or faculty development on QA-related topics, not necessarily to share our QA results:

  • CAL STATE TECH 2019, Panelist Beverly Bondad-Brown: The Case for LMS Differentiation: Does One Size Fit All Campuses?
  • CAL STATE TECH 2019, Birds of a Feather Host Beverly Bondad-Brown: Connecting Across Campuses to Develop Training for Teaching Hybrid and Fully Online
  • DETCHE 2019, Panelist Beverly Bondad-Brown: Give 'Em What They Want! Getting Faculty Into Your Training 
  • DETCHE 2018, Network Circle Host Beverly Bondad-Brown: Continuing to Connect Across Campuses: Training Faculty to Teach Hybrid and Online

Quality Assurance Results

 CETL QA-Related Certificate Completions 
2019 - 2020

CETL QA-Related Workshop Completions
2019 - 2020 

Launch of new Designing Online Course (DOC) Program

DOC Timeline graphic

Designing Online Courses (DOC) Program Timeline - Fall 2019
(Click to enlarge)

Quality Assurance Results (cont.)

Designing Online Course (DOC) Program (cont.)

CETL's new Designing Online Courses (DOC) Program consists of the following semester-long components:

  • A self-paced workshop entitled Introduction to Teaching Online
  • Online workshop: QM’s Connecting Learning Objectives & Assessments
  • Online module on course mapping to make sure course designs vary the Learner-Learner; Learner-Content; and Learner-Instructor interactions as well as address course alignment
  • Deliverable of a course mapping worksheet for at least 4 modules of the redesigned course
  • Instructional designer consultation that provides feedback on their submitted course mapping worksheet
  • Accessible Instructional Materials Webinar that addresses the accessibility of course materials
  • Adoption of CETL’s Canvas course template that aligns with many QM specific review standards
  • Online module on course building where participants build at least 4 modules of a hybrid/online course 
  • Instructional designer consultation that provides additional feedback and assesses course design. 

Development of Campus QA Resources

CETL Low Bandwidth Matrix

(Click to enlarge)


CETL Remote Instruction Checklist

(Click to enlarge) 

Accessibility/UDL Efforts

As part of our Fully Online Development Program, CETL instructional designers have designed an accessibility workshop and informal review process.  This training session includes the following:

  • How to check YouTube videos on correct captioning
  • YouTube auto-generated vs. manually added captions
  • Checking Word docs for headings, color contrast, alt text
  • Use of lists and tables in Word
  • How to use the Word Accessibility Checker
  • An activity on checking the accessibiliyt of a PowerPoint presentation
  • Differences between OCR and non-OCR PDFs

This year, 204 participants completed this workshop.

Next Steps for QA Efforts 

In the 2020-2021 academic year, we plan the following:

  • Continue CETL's Designing Online Courses (DOC) certificate program housed in CETL.
  • Offer QM's Connecting Learning Objectives & Assessments workshop to help faculty with course alignment.
  • Development of an informal QM review process to transition faculty toward formal QM course review
  • Increase participation in QM's Improving Your Online Course and encourage faculty to seek QM formal review. 
  • Train an additional QA team member to help facilitate QM's IYOC workshop.