Sacramento State Online Course Services

Online Course Services at Sacramento State is supported through the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and in partnership with Information Resources & Technology (IRT). The CTL provides professional development in the form of faculty learning community programs, the Summer Teaching Institute, the Summer Course Compression Grant program (in collaboration with the College of Continuing Education), New Faculty Orientation, and minigrant programs that fund pedagogy enhancement, learning analytics, assessment, and technology projects. Quality Matters™ (QM™) essential standards such as Accessibility and Alignment are intentionally integrated into each of these programs. 

2023-24 Program Goals:

1. Increase the number of faculty who have completed professional development to prepare their courses for internal and formal QM reviews and increase number of courses that have undergone internal and formal QM reviews from a diverse range of departments and colleges throughout the university.
2. Improve university processes and infrastructure for quality online teaching practices and policies.
3. Analyze data on student perspectives to assess and measure the impact of Quality Matters faculty training and course certification on student success.

We emphasize student success as the focus in our online course services and quality assurance efforts.

Course Reviews:  Our Internal and formal course review processes provide mentorship and support for course certifications. We highlighted QM standards such as alignment and accessibility in our FLCs to increase awareness about essential components and promote successful reviews. Professional development funding was awarded to faculty who had met standards for internal and formal reviews. Since Fall 2019, we have increased the number of certified courses from 2 to 25 with 2 more currently in process in summer 2024. We anticipate continued growth in this area as we have created a pipeline through our FLC that focused on preparing faculty for course reviews.

QM Certified Courses: 

QM & QLT Training: While many faculty completed QM and QLT workshops in previous years and less are taking QM workshops, we continued to offer training to new faculty. Faculty and staff involved in FLCs and mini-grants continue to take QM workshops. 

We use a 3-tier approach to meet the needs of faculty at various levels of readiness and have increased the number of institutional experts for online teaching and courses undergoing internal and formal reviews. We continue to market our services and support through campus announcements, word-of-mouth, webpages, professional development workshops and FLCs, and our relationships with colleagues throughout campus.

In addition to the QM and QLT workshops offered by the Chancellor's Office, we offered Faculty Learning Communities and Grants that prepared faculty to undergo QM review to certify courses. These FLCs and new Grants were facilitated by Sac State's QM Coordinators, along with the established SOG grant coordinated by members of the OCS team. Through these FLCs and grants, faculty made changes to their courses based on QM principles to ensure student success. 

New and Returning Grants:

• In addition to FLCs, we started new grants with greater expectations (and compensation) to help faculty redesign courses. The Tech4Equity, funded by the Developing Hispanic Serving Institutes grant of the US Dept of Education. 8 faculty are participating in 2024 in a grant designed to improve accessibility of high-demand GE courses and graduation rates among Hispanic and low-income students. 
• To meet needs of graduate students who prefer online or hybrid courses, we launched the OCS Grad Studies grant in summer 2024 and have 11 faculty redesigning courses to be taught online.
• Our returning grant, 20 faculty participating in Summer Online Grant program, transitioning semester courses to online and compressing to 6-weeks. 2 faculty who participated previously are preparing courses for QM review.

Experts at Sac State:

Role of the OCS team in the university: In the 22-23 year, the OCS team demonstrated their value to the university by serving as experts and consultants in various ways for pressing University issues related to online education. 

• An OCS co-lead spoke to Faculty Senate and requested the OCS team could work with Faculty Senate committees about revisions of the e-Learning policy in 2024-25
• An OCS co-lead worked with OCS members and led several university-wide discussions on the use of GenAI 
• An OCS co-lead revised a Syllabus template with a team of OCS members and Information Technology staff to be distributed to all university faculty.

These actions have demonstrated the value of having online education experts to University leadership and will impact faculty beyond those who teach fully online courses.   

Presentations of OCS data

In 2023, we completed a two-year qualitative study about faculty and student perspectives on courses that have been changed through QM training. We were accepted to present the findings in an podium presentation at the QM Connect Conference in Minneapolis in November, 2023. 

QM Connect Conference

November 2023, Minneapolis

We presented our experiences and recommendations for growing our QM program to the QM Connect conference, in collaboration with colleagues from CSU East Bay and CSU Office of the Chancellor.

Samples of the Sacramento State presentation are below:

OCS Leadership & Team 

Dr. Tara Sharpp, OCS co-lead and mentor
Dr. Michelle Dang, OCS co-lead and consultant
Dr. Corinne Rowland, mentor and accessibility & instructional technology consultant
Dr. Debra Welkley, faculty mentor

Prof. Avi Jones, faculty mentor
Deborah George, mentor and instructional designer
Kelsey Macias, mentor and instructional designer
Crystal Velazquez, mentor and instructional designer

CTL Leadership

Dr. Lynn Tashiro, Director