OSCQR: Quality Rubric for Course Assessment

New discoveries in the content area, instructional design, or technology tools a course uses are some of the on various aspects of your course may make the course outdated.  Having a continuous review and revision cycle allows for perpetual improvements for the course.  This benefits you as an instructor, the school with accreditation and academic standing, and the student success.  For this reason, it is best practice to consider a revision cycle for any course, and particularly online courses.

Assessment is key to instructional design regardless of the design model you implement, such as ADDIE or Dick and Carey.  Collecting feedback and reviewing the course is not a measurement of the faculty or developer, but to perform a diagnostic assessment on the design and effectiveness of the course.  It is important to not view the course review as a means to evaluate faculty.  This creates a culture of secrecy and mistrust amount faculty, instructional designers, and administration.  The review is a process for reflection on how we can improve the course to benefit the instructors and the students.  This cooperative approach adopts the premise that courses are not owned by a single person nor are they a direct reflection of that person.  Instead they are developed and improved through a collaboration of individuals with varying specialties with the goal of producing an exemplary course that promotes learning and student success.

In many ways the OPEN SUNY OSCQR Process and Rubric embodies the collaborative approach to course review and evolution. The three step process or framework includes:

1. A Course Review that results in a non-evaluative Action Plan to improve the design of the online course.
2. The Course Refresh prioritizes and targets specific improvements suggested in the Action Plan for improvements.
3. A Learning Review that identifies and determines the next set of improvements for continuous online course quality improvement

This framework is cyclical.  It creates a continuing process that promotes courses using best practices in instructional design, including promoting course accessibility. To that end, it is a tool to assist faculty, professional staff, administrators, and students by providing a process for improving education and student success rates.

The OSCQR rubric is an open resource and can be modified to the individual needs of most any institution and can be applied to more than just online courses. To this end, if you are sincere about developing quality online or hybrid courses, you should be working with your instructional designer or teaching and learning specialist and applying the principles in this rubric.

For a detailed view of the 50 standards in the rubric, please take a look below. Alternatively, these open resourcesite includes notes and short video for each of the 50 standards.  

The Content Editor in Blackboard

The Content Editor is a key tool used throughout Blackboard.  Whenever you need to:

• create content, or
• other pages,
• create messages, or otherwise
• post text

the content editor will be the tool you use.

Besides text, you can insert images, add web links, and many other features a word processor or web editor would allow. On the editor, there is a tool bar filled with icons, and when you roll your mouse pointer over an icon, a tool tip will appear to identify the icon.To prevent the loss of work, it is good practice to type your information offline in a simple text editor such as Notepad or TextEdit , and copy and paste into the Content Editor. To paste copied text into the Content Editor, you will need to use the "old-school" keyboard short cut: Ctrl -V (the mouse option does not work).

There are two views of the Content Editor:

• Advanced Mode: This presents the full toolbar of icons indicated by the upward pointing double arrow.  Click on that icon to reduce the number of rows of icons in the view. This will bring you to the Simple Mode and offer more screen real estate. 
• Simple Mode: Minimal set of icons featuring the most commonly used formatting functions. Click on the downward facing arrow to access more icons. 

For the most part, the Content Editor functions much like a word processor or any editor on the web.  Some of the most common functions you will use include:

• Formatting text.  The top left part of the bar have most formatting features.  Remember to use the Headings feature to identify headings.  It improves the accessibility of your work.
• Bullets and Numbers.  These are excellent for formatting web content. 
• Remove Formatting:  Have wonky formatting?  Is something not right?  Sometimes it is best to strip all the formatting and start again.  This can help.
• Indenting/Outdenting: This is excellent for formatting content for the web and accounting for whitespace.
• Insert/Edit or Remove Link:  Add hyperlinks to your documents to harness the power of the web.  Add context to the link with a brief description. 
• Insert Image:  This tool allows you to insert images.  You should be sure to
  • Consider copyright issues
  • Include a Title and Description (for accessibility)
  • Consider its position on the page
  • Be sure to use an image with the appropriate size and resolution
• The Mashups tool.  This will allow you to search and embed web 2.0 technology including images from Flickr and Videos from YouTube. 
• The HTML Editor: This tool lets you "look under the hood" at the HTML code that makes your page.  While this may intimidate some, this tool can be very powerful and allow you to embed useful interactive tools. 

Remember  to title the pages you create and hit submit.

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Helpful Tips:

• Functions that are grayed out are not currently available 
• You must select text to format text. 
• Click on the Full Screen icon in the toolbar to expand the working area in the Content Editor. You cannot save (submit) the page when in Full Screen. Click on the icon to reduce the screen, and the "submit button appears. 
• Click on the Preview icon in the toolbar to see the page as it will appear to the end user. 

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Credit to Open SUNY, Using the Content Editor.  Be sure to see the Open SUNY Student Orientation for more tips.