Internet Learning Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2014 | Page 27

Internet Learning 2005; Guldberg & Pilkington, 2006), they included required credentialing of specific competencies in the use of the Rubric and in an understanding of the application of the QM guiding principles of being collaborative, collegial, continuous, and centered in academic foundations around student learning. Quality Matters is a program that subscribing educational institutions use within the cadre of other components necessary to assure quality in their online learning programs. While the QM Rubric 2 is focused on the design of online and blended courses, the QM process was developed with the awareness that it impacts faculty readiness through the QM professional training program (emphasizing pedagogical underpinning of course design), as well as the benefits of collegial interactions across academic disciplines and educational institutions. Other factors affecting course quality include course delivery (teaching), course content, course delivery system, institutional infrastructure, faculty training/ readiness, and student readiness/engagement. The importance of other components in an institution’s quality assurance commitment to online education is acknowledged within the QM standards. Quality Matters is a faculty-centered, peer review process that is designed to certify the quality of online and blended courses. QM is a leader in quality assurance for online education and has received national recognition for its scalable, peer-based approach and continuous improvement in online education and student learning. As of the winter of 2013, there are 825 subscribing educational institutions and 160 individual subscribers; 3,998 courses have been formally peer reviewed; and 28,756 online educators have successfully completed QM professional development courses. In this article, the QM guiding principles – a process that is continuously improved upon and that is collegial and collaborative – are discussed in relationship to Boyer’s scholarship of application and scholarship of integration. An overview of the regular review of the QM Rubric and process, as well as examples of the use of data to continuously improve the Rubric and process are presented. Scholarships of Application and Integration While the construct of CoP (community of practice) (Shattuck, 2007) is useful in understanding the developmental phases of the QM program, the past decade can be described as an evolving practice of Boyer’s (1990) scholarships of application and integration. In a seminal publication of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Scholarship Reconsidered, Ernest Boyer challenged higher education to move beyond “teaching versus research” (p. 16) and for faculty to take on a scholarly approach to teaching by rigorous study of teaching in ways that are collaborative and connect theory with the realities of teaching. The term “the scholarship of teaching and learning 1 (SoLT)” is becoming an increasingly familiar concept in higher education (Hutchings, Huber, & Ciccone, 2011). Lesser known is that Boyer suggested “four separate, yet overlapping, functions” (p. 16) of scholarship. Those are the scholarships of discovery, integration, application, and teaching, and have been applied as useful tools in defining scholarship (AACN, 1999). • The scholarship of discovery relates to the most traditional functions of research, that is, exploration to generate new knowledge. 26