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Christian Aguiar, M.A.

Assistant Professor of English
UDC Community College

Going through the QM course review process was very much like a kinder, gentler peer review process. Our coach from CAL, Julian King, worked with my colleague and me over the summer to apply some of the core QM requirements to our courses. While our teaching practices already aligned with QM, Julian helped us ensure that we were applying these practices effectively to building an online shell.

When the review began, we had the opportunity to meet with the review team to discuss the specific types of feedback that would be most helpful and to then get feedback from three different peers who teach similar courses. The feedback itself reaffirmed the importance of backward design, clarity of objectives, and consistency of experience from unit to unit – the same things we’d devoted time and attention to all summer.

By the time I’d made the revisions, I knew we had a course that met the standards of similar courses offered at other universities across the country, in large part because the course had been designed with the QM standards in mind and then peer-reviewed by colleagues from three different institutions. This is particularly important at the community college because we know many students will attend several institutions before they’ve completed their education, so we need our courses to consistently hit those national standards.