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.
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