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. 

2024-25 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.
2. Improve communication and dissemination about university processes and infrastructure for quality online teaching practices and policies.
3. Collect data to assess and measure the impact of Quality Matters faculty training and course certification on student performance and 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. In the 24/25 AY, we added five more QM certified courses with 3 more currently in process in summer 2025. 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 since 2018: 

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. Many faculty have completed the AI Tools for Teaching & Learning in the past year. 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 continued two grants started in 2023/24 with greater expectations (and compensation) to help faculty redesign courses, including Tech4Teaching & Learning, a grant designed to improve accessibility of high-demand GE courses and OCS Grad Studies, a grant designed to help faculty redesign graduate courses to be taught online.
• We also offered the six offering of the Summer Online Grant program, with 15 faculty transitioning semester courses to online and compressing to 6-weeks.  Two faculty who participated previously received QM certification. This year we offered an advanced-track option for three faculty who participated before to prepare their course for internal review. 

Experts at Sac State:

Role of the OCS team in the university: In the 24/25 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 served on a Senate standing committee to provide online course insight into policy revisions such as the e-Learning policy, grading policy, and syllabus policy.
• 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.   

OCS evaluation data in progress

We have several multi-year efforts underway on our goal to assess and measure the impact of QM faculty training and course certification. We have launched new faculty and student surveys in 24/25 that collect pre and post-test data on faculty completion in faculty learning communities and grants. We will analyze the data this coming year. 

Initial responses build upon and verify our prior data (see below) that support our FLC and grant efforts to improve performance. 

We plan to collect student attitude and performance data next AY after faculty implemented changes based on this year’s FLCs and grants. 

Research Built on Prior Dissemination:

We presented our experiences and recommendations for growing our QM program to the QM Connect conference Nov 2023, 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. Debra Welkley, OCS Co-leader and mentor

Dr. Angela Laflen, faculty mentor 

Kelsey Macias, mentor and instructional designer
Dr. Crystal Velazquez, mentor and instructional designer
Dr. Corinne Rowland, mentor and accessibility & instructional technology consultant

Deborah George, mentor and instructional designer

CTL Leadership

Dr. Lynn Tashiro, Director