A Rubric for Improving the Quality of Online Courses

Abstract

All of the graduate students in the School of Nursing take some of their Master of Science courses online. A group of six School of Nursing faculty members and a graduate student received funding to determine best practices in online courses. The group developed an evaluation rubric to measure quality in the graduate online curriculum. They then applied the rubric to the core courses which are primarily offered online and are required for all graduate nursing students. The project had a positive impact on faculty by offering a tool useful for online course evaluation and development. Additionally it brought to attention the needs of faculty member development in online education.

The Development of a Competency-Based Assessment Rubric to Measure Resident Milestones

“…Within the health professions, rubrics have been used for assessing literature review skills, 9 grading papers, 20 assessing presentations, 21,22 improving the quality of online courses, 23 participating in online discussions, 24 determining clinical performance in the operating room, 16 and measuring skill development of aseptic techniques. 25 Overall, rubrics promote consistency in scoring, encourage selfimprovement and self-assessment, motivate learners to achieve the next level, provide timely feedback, and improve instruction.…”

Evaluation of an Online Graduate Nursing Curriculum: Examining Standards of Quality

“…The evaluation tool and process discussed in this paper is similar to recent examples of program-level evaluation strategies for online programs, including the Quality Matters program (http://www.qualitymatters.org/) the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia learning-centered teaching project (http://www.usp.edu/lct/assessment.shtml), the Rubric for Online Instruction project at CSU Chico(http://www.csuchico.edu/tlp/resources/rubric/rubric.pdf), and the rubric developed by Blood-Siegfried et al (2008).…”

“…By defining the extremes and middle of the scale, it is anticipated that others will be able to use the rating scale ranging from "to a very small extent, small extent, moderate extent, great extent, and very great extent". A recently published rubric by Blood-Siegfried et al, (2008) followed a similar process and used very similar quality indicators. That group evaluated five master's level nursing core courses using a series of 56 statements of quality and the instrument has been used for faculty new to online teaching.…”

Best practices for teachers new to distance education

“…Distance accessible teaching is a fairly new format in many schools of nursing, and the training needs of faculty assigned to distance accessible courses have not kept pace with the implementation of these courses [1,2,13,14] . Therefore, few effective role models for distance teaching are available in comparison to traditional classroom models.…”

“…Students can learn to hold individual group members accountable by completing peer evaluations of members based on objectives such as participation, collaboration, timeliness, and feedback to the group [19,20] . Examples of faculty rubrics developed for evaluation of distance accessible discussion boards and assignments are available in the literature [1,12,13,21] .…”