Quality Matters at Flinders University

QM Rubrics and Standards were created to help course developers, teachers, academics, entire organisations, and — most importantly — our students. The standards in each Rubric are intended to guide you through the development, evaluation, and improvement of your online topics. These standards and associated annotations are based on best practices that promote student learning and instructional design principles for quality topic design. The QM Rubric is supported by a thorough review of the research literature and is updated periodically to reflect new techniques and technologies that have become available.

The course review process involves a review of a topic by a team of trained, certified peer reviewers who are all experienced online academics. This academic-driven process is intended to be diagnostic with the overall goal of topic improvement. Instead of pass/fail judgments, the reviewers offer specific guidance to help the course developer modify the course to meet QM Standards. Throughout the process, it is recognised that there are multiple ways to meet each Standard and that no topic is perfect. To receive QM Certification as a quality online topic, a topic must meet Rubric Standards at 85% or higher in the overall scoring by the review team.

The Quality Matters process is designed to ensure that fully online topics and courses undergoing review will eventually meet Standards and receive QM Certification.

Support resources:

Canvas Community of Practice at Flinders – QM Exemplars

QM Higher Education Rubric, Seventh Edition

For further information regarding QM training, Applying the QM Rubric, and the topic review process please contact:

• Roger Howley | Senior Learning Designer - roger.howley@flinders.edu.au