Abstract:

Many challenges have arisen since online education has become more common than we once thought; COVID-19 to these days has shown the benefits of being able to study in an online format, generating a greater supply of academic programs.

52% of U.S. graduate students consider online college education superior to face-to-face classroom learning, in comparison to 39% of undergraduates who consider online courses to be better than face-to-face classes. (Colman, 2021).

Seeking to safeguard academic quality in this growth, in the program Master in Finance (MAF) online of EGADE Business School, a strategy was designed to implement best practices in online education and continuously advise professors, with a focus on two processes and the creation of two roles:
- Course design, accompanied by the Digital Coach (DC).
- Course delivery, accompanied by the Academic Quality Advisor (AQA).

DC objectives are:
- To provide advice and guidance in instructional design to ensure course structure and thread of course objectives, activities, and learning methodologies.
- To deliver on time to students a completed and structured course according to institutional templates used in the LMS (Learning Management System).

AQA objectives are:
- To apply an instrument designed based on Gagné's Instructional Events Model (Neo and Neo, 2009; Núñez, 2011) as an instructional model based on cognitive theory that associates nine instructional events with internal learning conditions.
- To accompany and support Master in Finance (MAF) online professors seeking their performance, the ECOA (student opinion survey) and student learning experience must be as satisfactory as possible. The AQA is present in each online session taught by teachers.

All these support strategies are based on and implemented according to the Deming Cycle: Plan, Do, Check, and Act (PDCA), a continuous improvement model, in a structured and measurable way. This quality management system has been used as a continuous improvement tool and is widely implemented in many industries and sectors (Taufik and Purba, 2020).

This measurement was carried out through two indicators:
- Course design (Plan and Do): timely and complete publication of courses before the deadline of each academic period.
- Course Delivery (Verify and Act): Student satisfaction, using the results of the ECOA, which is implemented in the courses at the end of the academic period.

The question that guides this research is: do the figures of Digital Coaches and Academic Quality Advisors improve the performance of Master in Finance (MAF) online professors?

The findings show that one of the main limitations in the professor's performance is adaptation to a model designed to be taught online. On the other hand, professors do not use the platform or LMS optimally.

The hypotheses that we evaluated were:
- The experimental courses (20 groups) that had support from the DC were published according to criteria established before the delivery date versus the control group that did not have support from the DC.
- The mean ECOA score of the experimental groups (20 groups) that were supported by an ACA is higher than the control group that was not supported by the ACA.

The results reveal that the course delivery model, in which a professor participates, requires the development of new skills but also requires that Universities consider how they should accompany and assist professors to generate better student academic experiences.

Keywords:

Quality Management, Online Education, Education Improvement, Professors Support, Online Best Practices, Online Master Degree.