A Rubric: Indicators of Quality Design for Online Courses
Abstract: Online learning has been identified as a growing area in the education sector and many educational institutions are expanding their offering of online courses. When designing online courses, there are several design considerations and decisions that need to be made. This paper advanced the development of best practices in terms of quality design and evaluation of online courses. An extensive research consisting of searching various academic journals and books using sources containing the words quality, design, evaluation, online learning, online courses, best practice, eLearning or a combination of these words as part of the readings to identify the most relevant papers to review and to determine existing research on quality design practices in online courses. This paper found the dimensions (1) course information, course structure and course organisation, (2) interaction and communication, (3) multimedia design, (4) assessment and feedback, and (5) effective use of technology of online courses to be important contributors towards the quality design of online courses. Using these dimensions, a valid and reliable evaluation instrument was developed – a rubric. This rubric offered a framework to determine the components contributing towards quality design in online courses. This framework has a set of benchmarks to assist instructors and course designers with self-evaluation tool for an online course and best practice guidelines to design online courses.