History
The SAU Faculty Senate approved the SAU Hybrid and Online Course Quality Assurance Policy during the Fall 2018 semester.
The College of Education and Human Performance (2019-2020) was the first college reviewed in the scheduled rotation, followed by the College of Business the next year (2020-2021). Based on feedback from faculty from both colleges, the Provost’s Office suggested that the quality assurance rubric be updated to include more details about how faculty could better meet the standards. The rubric was updated to include annotations informed by the Quality Matters and Online Learning Consortium rubrics
During our 2022 HLC visit, the HLC Review Team commended SAU for having a quality assurance system in place for hybrid and online courses and applauded having all four (4) colleges reviewed. The main recommendation from the HLC Review Team was to consider that three (3) years was too long for courses not to be reviewed – a result of how we rotate between different colleges for quality assurance reviews. Based on this recommendation, the Provost’s Office asked that an additional random 10% of all hybrid and online courses be reviewed every semester.
For our standard Quality Assurance Review, we request a list of all hybrid and online courses from IT Services at the start of the semester. We remind the Dean that we will review their college’s hybrid and online courses. Once we have that list, we review all the college’s hybrid and online courses that need to be reviewed. The only exception is merged courses, where we only review the “parent” courses, as the “child” courses remain empty after being merged.
After reviewing a course, the instructor is contacted with the review results, recommendations for improvement, and an offer to answer any questions or provide additional support. Once all of the courses have been reviewed, the results are shared with the Provost’s Office and the Dean of the college being reviewed.
We use the same list of hybrid and online courses from IT Services to select a random 10% of courses. With the list open, we use Google’s random number generator to choose courses. We review the randomly selected 10% of courses and send the results directly to the instructor.
- If the random number generator selects a number corresponding to a course that has already been reviewed that semester, we ask Google to generate a new number to choose a different course.
