How Does Continuous Improvement Impact Course Quality?

Ana

Continuous Improvement means a commitment to improving a course, being open to receiving feedback, and collaborating with an instructional designer who is dedicated to supporting faculty and promoting student success. In meeting with an instructional designer from the Continuous Improvement team, faculty are guided through the Course Design Inventory which was designed after leading quality assurance rubrics in higher education and relevant research on distance learning. We look forward to sharing best practices and other insights to help implement evidence-based practices.

Jessica

Continuous Improvement gives you a framework and process that helps support you in making impactful changes to your course over time. Whether you are working with an instructional designer, collaborating with fellow faculty members, or working alone by taking the time to reflect and listen to the feedback your ID, students, or colleagues have, can help you better develop a plan and act on it.

As Instructional Designers on the Continuous Improvement team, we can help you every step of the way. We can help you analyze and collect information about your course overall, or a particular project, module, or assignment. We will then help break up that change into smaller, actionable steps that can be implemented incrementally over a long period of time or a shorter period of time.

Brian

After your course runs once or twice, you can use the information from the Course Design Inventory, student feedback, and your own observations to develop ways to improve the way your course is presented to students. You might think of continuous improvement like a buffet - there are plenty of options to make a course better - but it would be overwhelming to implement them all at once. Focus on one or two large improvements or multiple smaller enhancements for the next semester. Once the class runs again, you can reassess how well those changes worked, and implement further improvements. Because our technology offerings are constantly changing and upgrading, it’s easy to add new functionality and interactivity to a course to make it more engaging, challenging, and rewarding for students to experience.