Background on the Quality Matters Plus Project
In November 2020, the Colorado Community College System (CCCS) released the “Colorado Online @ Consortial Model Overview report,” outlining a vision to restructure online course options within the system to ensure equity of access, support student success, prioritize accessibility, and provide consistent learner experiences within online courses across the system.
To support these outcomes, the Learning Design Subcommittee developed a set of online course design standards to guide faculty, instructors, and staff contributing to the design of online courses across CCCS. Taking the research-based and internationally-accepted Quality Matters (QM) rubric as a foundation, the subcommittee identified ways to strengthen this existing rubric through comparison to quality standards individual CCCS colleges had adopted as well as other recognized rubrics and frameworks in the field. These comparison points included but were not limited to SUNY Online Course Quality Review Rubric, Peralta Online Equity Rubric, Universal Design for Learning, and current best practices in the field related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Quality Matters Plus Standards at CCCS
The resultant Quality Matters Plus (QM+) standards modified 8 of the original QM standards from the Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric, Sixth Edition, and added 24 new QM+ standards that are organized according to the QM standards they expand. For instance, the QM Specific Review Standard (SRS) 1.9 reads, “Learners are asked to introduce themselves to the class.” The QM+ standard built through the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion is 1.9+, which reads, “Learners are provided with multiple opportunities to self-identify preferred names and pronouns and use them throughout the course.” In 2023, after the Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric, Seventh Edition, was released, the CCCS Learning Design Community of Practice reviewed the revisions and determined to remove three of the QM+ standards. The revision results in a total of 6 modifications to the QM Rubric standards and 23 QM+ standards.
The 23 new QM+ standards are added to the existing 44 QM standards (“Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric, Seventh Edition”), for a total of 67 quality online course design standards. To better support ease of reference and application, the Learning Design Subcommittee streamlined these standards into a Healthy Course Checklist that offers 6 criteria, or broad categories of course quality, as an entry point into quality online course design and review. The Healthy Course Checklist provides additional resources to support deeper involvement in online course design and review, including additional checklists that focus on the new lenses QM+ bring into our work as well as a full list of the QM+ standards.
This QM+ Standards Guidebook is provided as a resource to CCCS faculty, instructors, and staff who have some familiarity with the QM Rubric and seek to better understand the rationale for each of the QM+ standards. Because access to QM resources and professional development is restricted to subscribers, the Guidebook is not able to publish QM-generated content beyond cited references. If you are interested in putting the QM+ standards into their full context of the QM Rubric, please reach out to your college QM Coordinator.
As a final note for this introduction, the QM+ standards follow a core premise of QM that there are often many ways to meet a single standard. Design standards are aspirational. Our hope is that the standard descriptions and rationales provided in this Guidebook open up conversations at your college and within your department about different ways the standards may be met within your discipline and your course. The goal, above all, is to continuously improve our design practices so that our learners benefit.