Abstract:

In the early 2000s, the introduction of online classes in its modern form, particularly Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), resulted in some to predict that higher education the way we know it will soon disappear. They believed that Online education could affordably provide so many benefits that traditional education could hardly compete. However, these predictions have never materialized. Even when a global panic caused all classes to become online, after a few short terms, traditional classes returned even stronger. This is particularly the case for engineering programs. An important reason for unpopularity of many online courses is their low quality. To ensure the high quality of online and blended courses, several standards have been introduced, including Quality Matters (QM) and Quality Learning & Teaching (QLT). The QM certification has been very popular in the United State. It involves 44 standards, including 22 essential, 13 very important, and 9 important standards. While these standards assess almost all aspects of a course, the main principle is the alignment between the course various components, primarily the course learning objectives, module (class) learning objectives, learning activities, tools and technologies, and assessments. In this paper, the process of redesigning an engineering course (Thermodynamics) to meet the QM standards is presented. Then, the student performance factors, such as their pass/fail rate and their average grade in the course, are studied in the past five years. The results indicate that while some improvements can be observed in these parameters, the trends are not as clear as expected. The three major contributing factors are detected as follows. First, due to the fact that the redesign process took place gradually in a several year period, it was not possible to identify a specific point as the benchmark. Perhaps more importantly, there were other uncontrolled external factors that impacted the data, such as the pandemic, change in the program policies, and the subsequent student population change. Finally, the availability of online sevices that some students potentially used for cheating may have impacted the integrity of some assessments. Some remedies for these problems are discussed in the paper. The paper also presents the results of the student surveys and some feedback from students. Overall, while preparing the course for certification and the QM certification process are very time consuming, the positive outcomes in terms of student better learning, more positive experience, and greater general satisfaction justify the efforts.

Keywords:

Quality Matters (QM), Online, Thermodynamics, Quality Assurance.