Standardizing the Online Classroom

Later this evening I am meeting with the faculty in the IT Leadership program and one of the topics on our agenda is the use of a standardized grading rubric for online classroom discussion questions.  Over the past 18 months we have been working on providing a more uniform experience for our students across our online courses and the standardized discussion rubric represents the latest initiative to accomplish more commonality.

In the online environment, we must be able to strike a balance between the academic freedoms of creativity and individuality for the faculty and the need for consistency for the students.  Over the years, our IT Leadership courses have moved from a very creative environment where faculty build their own courses and design their own interface within the course management system to a more template style approach.

We are now using course developers to construct our online courses using an interface that is consistent across our courses.  Additionally, we are working toward applying common evaluation criteria for assessing written assignments and discussion questions.  However, while we are striving for a more uniform experience for our students, the faculty retain creative freedoms in determine the scope of the course and in designing the course materials and assessments.

Our goal is to end up with courses that allow students to focus on the course material rather than learning to navigate within the course and experiencing a different set of expectations for each course.  While the faculty are giving up some academic freedoms, we feel we are creating a better learning environment for our students; and improving student learning is our goal.