2019 - 08 - 24 - The Importance Of Course Evaluation Rubrics

When it comes to Course Evaluation I find that Rubrics Make the Evaluation Easier: For the most part, I find the Quality Matters Rubrics to be the most useful and their professional development is not only a fantastic resource for developing and evaluating online courses and workshops they are also fantastic examples of well planned out online learning products. The annotated Rubrics are worth the effort of the workshops, however, there are un-annotated copies of the quality matters rubrics available for free: • Higher Ed. Standards • Higher Ed. Publisher Standards • K-12 Secondary Standards • K-12 Publisher Standards • Continuing or Professional Standards The rubrics are also useful tools to use during the design process since they can be used as a checklist of key best practices. The annotated rubrics are available for members, currently, the fee for an individual membership is approximately $175 a year per rubric. https://www.qualitymatters.org/qm-membership/benefits-fees There are other rubrics available as well that I use often. The University of Illinois has a useful rubric that they have released under a Creative Commons License which makes it free to use. Their web-based rubric provides an excellent overview of best practices that can help with the design of online courses and they offer downloadable copies with room for comments and a checklist which can help when giving feedback on an already developed course. http://www.ion.uillinois.edu/initiatives/qoci/rubric.asp The University of Southern Mississippi Learning Enhancement Center has an “Online Course Development Guide and Rubric” It is essentially a rubric that I also like, while it doesn’t have as many specifics as the others it is an excellent way to quickly communicate a course evaluation. http://ablendedmaricopa.pbworks.com/f/LEC_Online_course+rubric.pdf Michigan Community College Association has another rubric. One of the items I like about this rubric is that it covers the importance of support for the faculty as well as the importance of “course maintenance” which is not common in other rubrics. http://www.mccvlc.org/~staff/content.cfm?ID=108 Clayton Wright from Grant MacEwan College has a detailed outline that works as an excellent checklist for evaluating courses. It is quite comprehensive with over 100 points to check and can be used for a detailed review of courses. http://elearning.typepad.com/thelearnedman/ID/evaluatingcourses.pdf