The Open SUNY Center for Online Teaching Excellence (COTE) has developed an online course design rubric and process that addresses both the instructional design and accessibility of an online course that is openly licensed for anyone to use and adapt. The aim of the Open SUNY COTE Quality Review (OSCQR) Rubric and Process is to support continuous improvements to the quality and accessibility of online courses, while also providing a system-wide approach to collect data across campuses, institutions, departments, and programs that can be used to inform faculty development, and support large scale online course design review and refresh efforts systematically and consistently. The OSCQR rubric and process are currently being used by 23 SUNY institutions.

Working with multi institutional teams of SUNY online instructional designers, librarians, distance learning directors, and technologists, Open SUNY COTE staff 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 Bb 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 COTE fundamental competencies for online teaching. We are continuing the process of building out the citations and annotations associated with each standard in the rubric here: OSCQR Rubric Annotations and Refresh resources – each standard is explained and supported by citations from the literature. A formal literature review is planned and in progress.

There are two components to OSCQR:

1. The OSCQR Process provides a Framework and Dashboard that supports a campus-tailored and scalable approach to improving the instructional design of online or blended courses.
   • The Framework includes:
     1. A Course Review that results in an action plan to improve the design of the online course.
     2. The Course Refresh based on the things targeted for improvement by the course review.
     3. A Learning Review that identifies and prioritizes the next set of improvements for continuous quality improvement.
   • The campus Dashboard is the tool from which all the rubrics at a given campus (or in a program, or department) can be generated, customized, and managed.
     1. It provides automations for campus-level management of all course reviews, custom prioritization of the standards, and incorporation of additional standards. It can be used with any rubric and can assign different rubrics to different courses.
     2. Analytics are built in to aggregate and track all course review progress, identify and document course design issues and trends, and to aggregate information across courses to inform faculty development initiatives and course development planning.
2. The OSCQR Rubric has 37 online course design standards and 37 accessibility standards. The Rubric is flexible and designed to be used in a variety of course quality assurance approaches.
   • By instructors and instructional designers in faculty development and course design professional development activities to inform and influence the design of new online courses.
   • By an individual instructor to self-assess and prioritize design improvements; to continuously review, revise and improve the instructional design of their existing online courses.
   • By an instructional designer to conduct a formal course review of an online course as part of an online course quality review process at the program, department, or institutional level.
   • As a peer review process, by a team of instructors interested in a peer-review model of online course review and continuous improvement (the teams can be made up of inter or intra disciplinary teams).
   • In a collaborative team model made up of a group of at least 3 people approaching the course review process from their own various specialized perspectives, i.e., instructional designer, course author, and external reviews that might include other subject matter experts (faculty), online librarian, student, instructional technologist, multimedia designer, other faculty.

A course review with the OSCQR Rubric produces an Action Plan that is framed from the perspective of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model, to help reviewers assess and target opportunities to improve the course’s social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence, in addition to the overall online course educational experience. It substantively addresses accessibility. The OSCQR Accessibility Rubric is based on the recommendations of SUNY’s Office of General Counsel in their 2013 memo, “Accessibility Considerations in the wake of SUNY’s Online Initiatives.” The rubric has been reviewed by members of the FACT2 Accessibility Task Force, and address the legal considerations required to be compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, New York State Enterprise IT Policy NYS-P08-005, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The OSCQR Rubric is unique and differs from other online course quality rubrics in several ways. It is not restricted to mature online courses. The Rubric can be used formatively with new online faculty to help guide, inform and influence the design of their new online courses. It is non-evaluative. Conceptually the rubric and process approach course review and refresh as a professional development exercise, to guide faculty in their understanding of improving course design from an effective practices perspective, rather than as a course evaluation, or quality assurance procedure. It prioritizes changes. The Action Plan, that is automatically generated by the course review process, presents recommendations for course design improvements based on the review, and assists in prioritization of course revisions based on the estimated time to make those improvements. The rubric also provides suggestions for course design improvements for each standard that can be selected from a menu of options by each reviewer to supplement reviewer feedback. The OSCQR Rubric can be customized, i.e., standards can be added, edited, and /or eliminated.