Quality Assurance

Quality assurance was critical to the project's success. With the University's reputation and student experience at stake, we needed robust processes to ensure every course met our standards before reaching students. Rather than treating quality as a final checkpoint, we embedded it throughout the development process. We developed a multi-stage quality assurance process that aligned with our course development stages. Each stage had its own review mechanisms, ensuring that potential issues were flagged early and addressed systematically.

The Quality Assurance Process

Discovery: Course Report

After the Discovery stage, a Course Report was developed. The report interrogated what the Learning Designer had learned about the existing course, flagged any concerns, and suggested changes. This comprehensive review examined:

The Course Report allowed the Learning Designer to flag potential issues with the Manager Educational Design, who could the facilitate discussions with Course and Program Coordinators and Project Team any identified issues or requirements for additional development resources for the course.

Design: Course Brief

The next quality checkpoint occurred in the Design stage with the development of the Course Brief. This document outlined the new course co-created between the Course Author and Learning Designer. The brief included:

The Course Brief provided a clear plan for the course structure, assessments, and learning experience that could be reviewed by external stakeholders. This document defined what was being agreed to be developed between Faculty and the Course Development team, setting a clear scope of work. Any gaps or issues could be identified during review and flagged, with changes made to the scope before development began.

Develop: Peer Review

Course development proceeded with ongoing peer reviews conducted between Learning Designers. These peer reviews were informed by the Adelaide Online Learning Experience and provided opportunities to sense check design intentions, content, flow, and media. These sessions enabled collaboration through the sharing of expertise, skills, and practices to solve problems and improve the learning experience.

Peer review wasn't a formality, but an essential part of ensuring quality while courses were still in development. Learning Designers could catch issues early, suggest improvements, and ensure pedagogical consistency across courses.

Build: Pre-Review Checklist

Once the Build stage was complete and the course was finalised in the Learning Management System, a checklist was completed before the Review stage began. This ensured that all essential elements were in place and the course was ready for comprehensive review.

Review: Multi-Perspective Evaluation

The Review stage involved three distinct reviews, each bringing a different perspective:

  1. Student Review
    The team utilised the Students As Partners program to engage students in reviewing courses. These reviews helped sense check the student experience and ensure clarity of communication, especially regarding expectations for study and assignments. Student reviewers also conducted fault and error checking, finding inconsistencies and issues within the course experience—often centred around grammar and spelling, but frequently flagging bugs and issues with media that required fixing.
  2. Faculty Review
    The Faculty review focused on subject matter, ensuring the validity of content and relevance to the discipline. Faculty reviewers also engaged in error checking, providing another layer of quality control on accuracy and presentation.

Reviews from students and faculty were funnelled back to Course Authors and the Course Development team, who actioned the required changes.

  1. Adelaide Online Learning Experience Rubric
    A final review was then conducted by the Manager, Educational Design, using a rubric developed from the Adelaide Online Learning Experience.

INSERT IMAGE or LINK TO RUBRIC

This tool was developed to evaluate the course experience against the five principles and highlight any deficiencies. The rubric also provided courses with feedback and identified areas for future improvement. If the course passed this final check, the Manager made a recommendation to sign off, which was then confirmed with the Program Coordinator. Only at this point was the course deemed ready to teach and made available to students.

Evaluate: First Run Review

A First Run Review was completed at the end of the first session the course was taught. This allowed teaching staff to provide feedback on any required changes back to the Course Development team and Course Authors. Staff checked the student experience, grade distributions, and sought to identify any concerns with student performance across the course. Any required changes were made, and if changes to ongoing development practices were needed, these were also enacted.

Embedding Quality Throughout

Our quality assurance process wasn't a single gate at the end of development—it was woven throughout the entire process. Each stage had its own quality mechanisms, each serving a specific purpose:

This multi-stage approach meant issues were caught early when they were easier and less expensive to fix. It also meant that by the time a course reached students, it had been reviewed multiple times from multiple perspectives, ensuring a consistently high-quality experience.

This completes the cycle of the outlined Course Development Process and demonstrates how lessons learned through the quality assurance process were incorporated back into development practices, enabling continuous improvement across all courses.