2025-2026 — Northridge — Online Course Services ePortfolio

Proposal Summary: The QA program CSUN continues building on our strong history of supporting faculty to implement QLT Best Practices in their courses. We served 17 faculty who had courses reviewed this past year in our eLearning Institutes (15) and our “Advanced” tier Ad Hoc eLearning Peer Review program (2). Participants implemented QLT best practices in their course, conducted a QLT self-review and participated in an internal peer review/mentoring. Over 850 students were impacted by courses directly improved through these programs, with more impacted in the other courses these faculty teach. We created an eLearning eGPT AI Bot using ChatGPT as a pilot project and presented on its use at AI conferences at CSUF and CSUN.

Campus Goals for Online Course Services
There were three main goals for this funding. The first goal was to maximize OCS funding in lean budget times by focusing on faculty who would have a strong impact on students.

• We introduced a Chair-nominated eLearning Institute Award for their recommended faculty to refine a course through self-review and peer faculty mentorship (and receive $500 funding).
• Department Chairs recommended faculty they identified as good candidates for the program, especially those teaching courses that have a lot of impact on students (e.g. large enrollments, gateway, etc.) and could benefit from increasing the amount of online components in their courses.

The second goal was to continue to promote QLT as CSUN’s best practices framework, especially with faculty who are new or newer to CSUN.

• We shared information about the programs in our New Faculty Foundations programs.
• We sent targeted recruitment information to our recent cohorts of new faculty to encourage them to participate in QLT-focused programming.
• We included information about CSU OCS QLT programming in our Newsletter and on our Website.
• We created an eLearning eGPT AI Bot using ChatGPT as a pilot project and presented on its use at AI conferences at CSUF and CSUN.

The third goal was to further support the valuable experiences for our faculty mentors who are completing peer reviews in our eLearning Institute and Ad Hoc Review program.

• The faculty mentors reported positive experiences discussing course design and reviewing instructional materials with other faculty.
• They also reflected on discussions of equity-minded teaching to help their students succeed.

All of these activities are closely aligned with broader campus priorities, including the values of Faculty Development. Quality assurance is an integral part of the Faculty Development mission to adopt technology-enriched best practices for the development of our programming and our partnerships across campus.

Online Course Services Lead

• Hillary Kaplowitz, Senior Instructional Designer, Faculty Development, eLearning Institute Program Lead

Supporting Campus Partners
The QA Faculty Lead is joined by the Office of Faculty Development team, all of whom are involved in training and are critical in support of the peer-to-peer professional development and the successful adoption of quality assurance methods to a growing number of online/hybrid courses and eLearning projects:

• Kaitlin Bahr, Health Sciences, eLearning Faculty Fellow
• Star Glover, English, Queer Studies, Academic First Year Experiences, eLearning Faculty Fellow
• Sue Magdziarz, Faculty Development,  Instructional Designer
• Christian Reyes, Faculty Development, Instructional Designer 
• Nayan Ramirez, Director of Faculty Development

We partner closely and collaborate with multiple units/offices across campus to design high-quality professional development to support faculty in learning both the pedagogy and technical skills for teaching online. These partnerships include: IT’s Academic Technology unit, Universal Design Center, The University Library, The Learning Resource Center, Institutional Research, Student Affairs, Faculty Affairs, and our Student Success Office.  

Campus Commitment Toward Sustainability of OCS Efforts

• CSUN historically has been able to protect matching funding for eLearning Institute participants and peer reviewers. However, given the current CSU-wide budget reductions and restrictions, this funding is not available at this time.

  Faculty Development continues to develop programming around QLT and to integrate QLT into other programs whenever possible.

Summary of Previous OCS  Accomplishments

2024-2025: The OCS-funded projects served to help us continue to promote QLT as the campus's best practices framework. We sought out unserved faculty, and especially new faculty across all departments and disciplines. New faculty were given a roadmap of professional development they can complete in their first three years, and our eLearning programs are one of the programs suggested. 23 faculty representing 21 unique departments completed the eLearning Institute during the summer or winter. Of those 23 faculty, three are new faculty from the 2024-25 cohort and another six are pre-tenured faculty. We also launched our Ad Hoc Peer Review Program as our “advanced” tier eLearning Institute for faculty who have previously completed the eLearning Institute to receive feedback from a faculty mentor to review their QLT Workbook, course, and syllabus with three faculty members completing their reviews. We also continue to encourage faculty peer-to-peer discussions of online best practices and equity-minded teaching through our faculty mentors with their one-on-one mentoring and informal peer review for the eLearning Institute courses and three Ad Hoc Program courses. We also created a Canvas site to provide faculty mentors with a professional community to support their interactions with faculty, especially in regard to equity-minded teaching

2023-2024: We continued to promote Quality Learning and Teaching (QLT) as the campus best practices framework by reaching more unserved faculty and new faculty across all departments and disciplines. We also encouraged more faculty peer-to-peer discussions of online best practices and equity-minded teaching through our faculty mentors. In 2023-2024, we served 39 faculty members in our two eLearning Institute cohorts, helping them conduct a QLT self-review and participate in an internal peer review/mentoring for their courses for the first time. We also piloted a new advanced version of the eLearning Institute for 16 faculty who wanted to further develop a course they had previously worked on in an eLearning Institute. Additionally, we created and implemented a QLT student survey in our eLearning Institute and collaborated with Online Course Services to pilot a QLT Core 24 Prep Review with three faculty achieving this certification.

2022-2023: We continue to support online, hybrid, and technology-enhanced education through our programming. This year we updated our programs to reflect the updates in QLT 3.0, which involved an extensive redesign of our materials. We also drew from our materials to assist in contributions to the CSU Quality Assurance Resource Repository (QuARRy) from our experienced faculty. In addition, we collaborated with CSUN Academic Technology on a new project to develop a Canvas template for our campus, which was designed with QLT best practices. Lastly, we completed the final course review for our full course review pilot program.

2020-2021: As we pivoted virtual instruction due to the COVID-19 emergency, we encouraged as many faculty members as possible to go through our eLearning Institute with the allocated funds. That required a complete redesign of the eLearning Institute format incorporating a QLT self-review and peer review components. We created a QLT workbook and offered train-the-trainer sessions to prepare the selected eLearning alumni to be QLT peer reviewers. Later in 2021, CSUN also started piloting QLT course certification with a small group of faculty.

2014- 2019:  CSUN made significant efforts to disseminate the QLT rubric among faculty and campus leaders. Some of the previous accomplishments include: integrating QLT in the face-to-face eLearning programs, such as the Institutes and the Online Teaching and Learning series; creating and maintaining a QLT webpage; holding a two-day retreat for department chairs; presenting at the Association for Educational Communication and Technology (AECT) Conference, and hosting peer review trainings and other types of QLT workshops on campus.

Dissemination of OCS Efforts— Conferences 
Faculty Development presented at two conferences during the 2025-2026 academic year:

• eLearning eGPT: Enhancing Faculty Critical Thinking Through AI-Driven Pedagogy at the AI & Academia: The Future of Critical Thinking at CSU Fullerton on Friday, Feb. 20, 2026 
• Using AI Bots to Enhance Faculty Professional Development at the Matador AI Day at CSU Northridge on March 27, 2026

These two presentations focused on the eGPT, a custom AI Bot created to support faculty in our eLearning Institutes in implementing QLT in their courses. We share information about AI Bots in general, considerations for using an AI Bot, as well as a description of our eLearning Institute programming and the process we employed to create the eGPT.

Training Completions

CSUN eLearning Institute Completions Since 2020
Since 2020, more than 365 faculty have completed CSUN’s eLearning Institute and over 400 courses have been enhanced with these best-practices. Evaluations from this year’s cohort indicated participants had high levels of agreement that the Institute helped them learn how to use quality standards to design effective and engaging courses, rating that an average of 4.7 out of 5. Additionally, participants reported that the eLearning Institute helped them find areas to update their courses to align with the CSU Quality Learning and Teaching (QLT) framework, rating that an average of 4.7 out of 5.

Faculty are asked to rate their confidence level in the program objectives before and after their participation. The average pre-program confidence level was 2.1 and post-program increased to 3.6 (1 = not confident, 4 = very confident):

What are CSUN faculty saying about the eLearning Institute

Participant: “Taking the time to review my course using the framework and seeing others' examples gave me tangible, specific strategies and spurred ideas that will greatly improve my class materials and instruction. The structure and examples were extremely beneficial.”

Peer Reviewer: “Our discussion really reminded me of why the faculty/student relationship is important and what is so transformative about education.”

Course Peer Review and Course Certifications
Individual departments at CSUN have expressed interest in CSU QLT Certification. The Marketing Department completed a previous pilot for full certification of five courses. Recently Faculty Development collaborated with Online Course Services to help design and pilot a QLT CORE 24 Prep Review process to be able to provide another option at CSUN.

We have established a process for faculty to prepare for CSU QLT Certification by first completing our eLearning Institute (including student survey) and making revisions before then doing an Ad Hoc eLearning Peer Review. These two steps should better prepare faculty for CSU QLT Certification.

We continue to explore department-funded CSU QLT Certifications and are currently working with the Systems and Operations Management Department (SOM) to get SOM 306 Operations Management to go through CSU QLT Certification. The faculty member has taken this course through the eLearning Institute and completed an Ad Hoc eLearning Peer Review. Currently, the faculty member is making revisions, which we will review again before they proceed to start the CSU QLT Certification Process.

Student Online Quality Assurance Impact Research 
This past year, over 850 students were impacted in courses redesigned during the eLearning Institute. Our CSUN-developed instrument for measuring student perceptions of our eLearning Institute participants’ teaching practices is an important part of our eLearning programming in order to capture QLT CORE item themes observable by students.

During the last few weeks of the semester, students in courses taught by an eLearning Institute participant complete our survey to gauge the impact of the program.

• Students reported higher than a 4 (out of 5) on all items, indicating that faculty demonstrated competency in QLT practices.
• Faculty were provided with survey results and asked to reflect on changes made in their course and to generate ideas for future improvements.

Development of Campus Online Course Services Resources

• Faculty Development's QLT page is the QLT hub used for dissemination of our CSUN specific QLT organization, links to the rubric, and dates of the CO QLT trainings. 
• Faculty Development's programming page is continually updated with the most current programs that faculty can sign up at CSUN.
• eLearning Institute page explains how the program uses the QLT rubric for self-review and peer review of a course.
• Faculty Development's Teaching Toolkit canvas site is a self-paced resource that features many resources to support faculty in their teaching.

Accessibility/UDL Efforts
In all our programming, we infuse accessibility and universal design for learning as a key element in course design and development.

For example, we promote the use of the CSUN Canvas Template with QLT best practices, created by the Faculty Technology Center in collaboration with Faculty Development and Faculty Fellows.

The Canvas template was designed with a 100% accessibility rating and Universal Design for Learning principles that support student learning and user-friendly course design.

Next Steps for OCS Efforts 

• Utilize our Department Chair nomination process for our eLearning Institute to maximize the impact of the funding.
• Create opportunities for faculty mentors to continue to develop their peer evaluation and mentoring skills.
• Recruit eLearning Institute alumni to participate in further professional development, such as our Ad Hoc program.
• Maintain our webpage dedicated to QLT with updates about the CO's programs on the Faculty Development website.
• Continue to promote QLT as the campus's best practice framework for integrating technology into courses for flexible delivery (online, hybrid, hyflex, technology-enhanced) by offering various professional development programming as well as creating and updating resources for faculty such as:
  • Get Up to Speed with Online Teaching
  • eLearning Institute
  • Ad Hoc Peer Review Program
  • Faculty Learning Communities
• Continue to develop an internal process for tracking QLT Certification, perhaps with a dedicated Canvas site if the numbers warrant it.