About OSCQR
Our goal is to ensure that all online courses meet quality instructional design and accessibility standards, and are regularly and systematically reviewed, refreshed, and improved to reflect campus guidelines and research-based online effective practices.
The OLC Online Course Quality framework provides a process, tools, and resources to systematically review, refresh, and continuously improve online courses.
Open SUNY, in collaboration with campuses throughout the SUNY system, has developed an online course design rubric and process that addresses the instructional design and accessibility of an online course. The rubric is openly licensed for anyone to use and adapt. The aim of the Open SUNY Course Quality Review (OSCQR) Rubric and Process is to support continuous improvements to the quality and accessibility of online courses, while also providing an approach to collect data that can be used to inform faculty development and support large-scale online course design review and refresh efforts systematically and consistently.
In November 2016, a partnership was formed between Open SUNY and the Online Learning Consortium (OLC). OLC adopted OSCQR as one of their online quality scorecards. This allowed us the opportunity to share OSCQR with the broader OLC community and to partner with them on the next generation of the digital interactive OSCQR rubric and dashboard.
OSCQR provides a process, an online dashboard, and interactive rubric to systematically review and refresh the instructional design and accessibility of online and blended courses, as well as complete online degree programs. We invite collaboration and feedback on the use of OSCQR and input and suggestions from the community.
Working with multi institutional teams of SUNY online instructional designers, librarians, distance learning directors, and technologists, the OSCQR team started with the Chico rubric, 20 years of SLN research-informed best online practices, the SUNY office of general counsel’s memorandum on accessibility considerations, and conducted a gap analysis with Quality Matters, iNACOL, and the Blackboard exemplary courses. The resulting rubric was also informed by the Community of Inquiry model (Garrison, Anderson, and Archer, 2000), The 7 Principles for Good practice in Undergraduate Education (Chickering & Gamson, 1987), The Adult Learner (Malcom Knowles, 1973), Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom et al., 1956) and How People Learn (Bransford et al., 1999), and mapped to the Open SUNY fundamental competencies for online teaching.
OSCQR Version Development Timeline and History the Open SUNY/ OLC Partnership
