2022-23 Cal Poly SLO 

Navigating Change

Cal Poly's Center for Teaching, Learning & Technology provides support and informed and consistent quality reviews for all participants in the QLT award cycle, and promotes high quality online and hybrid course development across the University. 

Our program:

Cal Poly’s primary quality assurance activities supporting online education are offered through our Center for Teaching, Learning & Technology (CTLT), located in the Robert E. Kennedy Library. The QA team is led by Catherine Hillman, Instructional Designer (and also current faculty in the College of Business), and the team offers robust support in the areas of teaching pedagogy, Learning Management System (Canvas), Multimedia and other content development and delivery, Accessibility, and assessment.

Campus Commitment Toward Sustainability of OCS Efforts

• The CTLT and Provost's office continue to provide stipends for faculty completion of all OCS workshops offered throughout the year
• The CTLT has generously assisted in sending our team to various conferences that focus on hybrid & online teaching, LMS, UDL and DEI.

Summary of Previous OCS  Accomplishments

This year we sent eight faculty through the certification for reviewing courses with the QLT Rubric. Significantly more faculty (in the hundreds) revised their course proposals for the transition to semesters with the inclusion of an online modality request, which will result in more courses having the option for online delivery in 2025 when the campus changes to semesters.

Campus Goals for Online Course Services

Goal 1: Continue to recruit faculty for online course reviews

Starting in the Summer of 2022, we presented the Online Opportunities workshops (describing OCS opportunities for online course review), as well as “Drop In Online Course Development Days”, where used some of the rollover surplus hospitality funds by offering a series of quiet days in our Library classroom. Faculty could “drop in” any time from 8am until 1pm and receive assistance in course development, or receive information about how to continue their progress toward becoming an online reviewer. For both types of events, participants were offered information about the OCS reviewing program and encouraged to apply.

Goal 2: Train faculty in online and hybrid course delivery, promote Q1 certification

During Fall, we continued to offer our IOTL and Blended workshops. Unfortunately, the quarter-to-semester conversion workshops were a heavy competition with our offerings and we had fewer participants than anticipated, however we did add 8 more faculty to the course reviewer ranks.

Goal 3: Launch semester-based courses with an online option

While this goal is still in the initial stages of development, we have an opportunity to convert all quarter-term courses to semester courses and ask for online options for each course, pursuant to college/department approval. In doing so, we will enable many of our courses to be launched on the https://ocs.calstate.edu/ system, which is not a viable option under the current quarter system. We continue to be a strong presence in conversations throughout the campus during this transition process, and we have encouraged faculty to present change-of-modality approval options with their course proposals. This is going well.

Goal 4: Contribute to the SQuAIR research

Kelly Bennion has been a fantastic colleague in this endeavor, and we hope to bring her back for yet another year with this project!

Workshops and events

This past year was a busy one! We added quite a few more workshops to our offerings, and served more faculty than before. Below are our workshops for Online/Hybrid instruction and our DEI and UDL workshops.

Summer ‘22

• Blended/Hybrid workshop
• Drop-in Online & Hybrid Course Development
• IOTL (Intro to Online Teaching & Learning)
• Blended/Hybrid workshop
• Assignment and Assessment Design to Promote Academic Integrity
• Inclusive Course Design: Implementing the UDL Guidelines
• Grading for Equity workshop (Guest faculty presenter)

Winter ‘23

• Creating Accessible Course Materials
• Inclusive Course Design: Implementing the UDL Guidelines
• Creating a Blended/Hybrid Course
• Intro to Equitable and Inclusive Teaching
• Assignment and Assessment Design to Promote Academic Integrity
• Book Circle: Whistling Vivaldi
• Community of Practice: Grading for Equity (Guest faculty)

Spring ‘23

• Intro to Equitable and Inclusive Teaching
• Creating Accessible Course Materials
• Creating a Blended/ Hybrid Course
• Assignment and Assessment Design to Promote Academic Integrity
• Inclusive Course Design: Implementing the UDL Guidelines

Course Peer Review and Course Certifications

Describe efforts for providing campus level peer review of blended/online courses.  This could include efforts in setting up a process for peer review, list who is involved in serving as reviewers, and list the course(s) and instructor(s) who went through campus-level or CSU formal peer review.  Include any feedback provided by the faculty/staff involved (optional). 

Student Online Quality Assurance Impact Research 

Kelly Bennion provided us with excellent results from our student polling, and as a result we have incorporated the key takeaways into our Fall lineup of Blended & Hybrid course development workshops as well as our New Faculty Foundations workshop for creating better communication with students via Canvas.

This fall, faculty can self-enroll in our newly revised Launching a Canvas Course workshop with a related Zoom discussion group.

Challenges

Cal Poly is facing a profound shift as we transition our course offerings from the quarter system to a semester system. During this time, we are reaching out to all faculty to encourage their proposals to include hybrid and online modalities, with much success already. When Cal Poly has completed this transition, the hope is to finally be able to post our courses on the https://www.csufullyonline.com/ site.