Leveraging Quality Matters Certified Courses

Short version: An institution that facilitates and supports Quality Matters (QM) centered reviews of online courses could leverage those courses by licensing a QM certified course from the faculty developer on a semester-to-semester basis and distribute that QM certified course to any faculty – including or perhaps especially adjuncts – teaching the course.  For me, that would be a win-win-win solution for the institution, the faculty developer and all other faculty teaching the same course.

Long version and a few issues are described below.  After I explain all of this, please comment and tell me what sort of things I don’t know about QM or licensing issues etc that preclude an institution from doing this ;-)

Several posts, tweets and conversations over the past week prompted what is probably not a new/unique idea

• Barry Dahl tweeted . . .
  So, the alternative title for this post is: “Why so many versions of the same online course?” Many institutions have as many versions of an online course as they have faculty teaching that online course.  Why?  Faculty typically develop their own course content, so 14 faculty teaching ENGL 1301 online for a community college means that community college has 14 uniquely developed online versions of the course.  I’ve encountered only a few instances in which institutions strategically develop online course materials to be distributed to all faculty teaching the course.
• I had a conversation with a friend that will be teaching adjunct for the first time at a community college. She commented how much work she has to do to figure out the course for the first time, and that’s even with her having extensive teaching experience.  It’s STILL a new course and a great deal of preparation.
• I noticed an institution that lists the courses and faculty developers that have received QM certification for their courses.  I wondered how much was spent on the QM review and know that only one course and group of students each semester will benefit from that quality review.

The Plan.  Given an course that has received QM Certification, offer the faculty developer of the course a nominal fee per semester for the rights to distribute that version of the course to every faculty member – adjunct and full time – that is teaching the course for the college – online or on campus. Faculty using the course have license to edit or modify the course as needed, and it may be copied from one semester to the next, but that copy must be reported and licensed.

The Benefits.  First, for less than the salary cost of one course section, every faculty member teaching the course has access to use a QM certified course.  That likely improves the online content available to students in a great number of courses; certainly, that won’t be true in every instance, many faculty develop high quality courses worthy of QM certification.  However, at the very least, providing the QM certified course will (a) allow experienced faculty an opportunity to add more high quality content to an existing, quality course, and (b) more importantly, provide a greatly needed resource available to adjunct faculty.  Providing adjuncts with online course materials for use in on campus or online courses would be a tremendous improvement over the predominant “Here’s-a-textbook-and-an-institutional-syllabi-for-the-course” approach to providing resources to adjuncts.  IF even 50% of the adjuncts teaching ENGL 1301 begins using the QM certified course, the quality of instruction for that course will improve as those faculty focus more on actually teaching rather than trying to scope, sequence, and develop course materials.

Second, the issue sidesteps the sticky IPR issue and finds a win-win-win for everyone involved.  This idea immediately raises the question of ownership, “Who owns the developed online course in the first place?” Faculty will immediately tell you it’s their course; they developed it.  However, institutions may answer that question differently.  Institutional intellectual property policies become critical, and if the faculty member leveraged any institutional equipment or resources while developing the course, the institution may have a legitimate “work for hire” claim to the course.  Rather than trying to work those out, the institution licenses the course at a very reasonable cost which increases the return on that investment; the faculty member receives additional compensation for licensing the course; and other faculty get a tremendous head start for making online content available to their students or a resource to add additional high quality content to their course.

Third, if the adoption rate of a licensed QM course becomes significant enough, the institution greatly reduces the task at hand in addressing course quality.  Propagating QM certified course materials via a $1500/semester cost is much more scalable than facilitating a QM review for every faculty member that teaches a course and infinitely more feasible than managing to get QM quality courses developed for or by every adjunct.

The Issues.  The primary stumbling block will be (a) any licensing issues with QM and (b) monitoring the potential for the continued use of licensed materials beyond the scope of the license.  I’m not entirely familiar with QM licensing; if anyone has insight relevant to this idea, I’d appreciate that being shared in the comments.   The institution will have to diligently monitor the continued use of the licensed material to ensure that the licensing of content from faculty developers is not abused.  What other issues might there be?

Your thoughts/comments are of interest.