Current Practices and Needs Assessment of Instructors in an Online Masters Degree in Education for Healthcare Professionals: A First Step to the Development of Quality Standards

Instructional quality of online delivery is still a common concern. Quality assurance requires a comprehensive framework of several perspectives of learners’ and instructors’ needs including critical analysis of their teaching and learning practices with the course technology platform. Using online surveys and semi-structured interviews with 10 instructors and 29 students, this case study investigated current instructional practice, needs, and achievements of the instructors and students in an Online Masters Program for Healthcare Professionals. Although the findings indicated little real concern about the program quality, a majority of our instructors and students still believed that initiating specific course design and teaching standards in our program would maximize instructors’ and students’ performancein our future courses. The process we followed in this study encouraged a helpful dialogue about program expectations, including training expectations of instructors and course design/development and teaching standards (best practices) for the online master’s program. We became more conscious that applying standards successfully requires more support from the instructors. Online education places new demands on faculty, most of whom come to this new environment predominantly with classroom teaching experience. Few have experienced online courses as either instructor or student. Faculty are accustomed to functioning independently in a traditional classroom environment – developing courses without assistance from others and managing the classroom on their own. Requirements are different in an online learning environment, where consistency and organization are important to ensure a quality experience. In order to provide training and on-going support for instructors, we must approach online teaching and learning in a more global and systemic manner as we plan quality standards. The use of high quality instructional and course design standards by instructors in online learning has numerous benefits, but not without some difficulties. Moving from traditional methods of teaching to online delivery methods of instruction is challenging due to the dramatic shifts in the perspectives of both the instructors and learners (Dringus, 2000). In this respect, most educational institutions are creating or adopting quality statements, standards, or criteria regarding their web-based distance learning programs. These standards are commonly written as Journal of Interactive Online Learning Lewis, Baker, and Britigan 50 a faculty guidance manual, which typically covers issues such as the process of course proposal and approval, evaluation and assessment, expectations and requirements, and best practices in online teaching. Some address enrollment caps, teaching loads, and legal issues. These guidance documents are mostly based on university-wide standards and are not program or discipline specific. National initiatives have been developed in some institutions to provide a consistent approach to assuring quality. One such program that has been developed for online courses is the University of Maryland’s “Quality Matters” project (http://www.qualitymatters.org). This project was developed as an inter-institutional quality assurance and course improvement process to certify online courses and components. Several annotated rubric tools were created to assess areas such as 1) overall design of the course website including navigational features; 2) use of learning objectives; 3) assessment strategies, policies, and tools; 4) instructional materials and resources; 5) learner interaction; 6) course technology; 7) learner support; and 8) accessibility. Frydenberg (2002) summarized current published quality standards for electronic learning and organized them into nine domains: 1) executive/institutional commitment; 2) technological infrastructure; 3) student services; 4) design and development; 5) instruction and instructor services; 6) program delivery; 7) financial health; 8) legal and regulatory requirements; and 9) program evaluation. Others have defined a quality framework based on the similar concepts and have developed metrics to support quality learning environments and quality management. Examples are 1) the Sloan Consortium quality framework and five pillars of quality online education (Lorenzo & Moore, 2002; Moore 2005), 2) seven principles of effective education in technology based education (Chickering & Gamson, 1987; Chickering & Ehrmann, 1996), 3) guidelines for identifying and evaluating web-based courses (American Distance Education Consortium -ADEC), 4) Guiding Principles for Distance (http://www.adec.edu/admin/papers /distance-teaching_principles.html), and 5) twenty-four quality assurance benchmarks in the web-based learning environment described by Yeung (2002). Different groups have provided varying perspectives about standards, quality, and evaluation of online instruction. Some of these provide checklists for review of the courses, peer review teams, or rubric tools as mentioned earlier. Most of these tools or approaches to assess quality of online coursework have merit in some specific areas, but online programs require more comprehensive course design and instructional standards. These standards should address distance education pedagogy with specific emphasis on instructional strategies designed to foster interaction, convey concepts, and assess student learning. Standards must provide guidance to the instructor in translating face-to-face courses into the distance delivery mode in order to achieve specific learning outcomes. The purpose of this research study was to describe current practices, needs, and achievements of instructors and students in an online masters degree program. Since the faculty in this program developed their own courses and instructional materials, examination of the course design and teaching approaches was necessary prior to initiating standards for quality assurance. The primary research question for this study was: What are the current practices, needs, and achievements of instructors and students in the online masters program? Around this focus were the following sub-questions which guided the subsequent development of standards and best practices for online teaching in the master’s program: • How do program instructors use Blackboard to design and manage their courses? • What options in online teaching and learning are not supported by Blackboard? Journal of Interactive Online Learning Lewis, Baker, and Britigan 51 • What additional support or technological features are needed for both students and instructors? • What instructional approaches and activities should be employed to promote online teaching and learning? • What types of course design and instructional approaches are effective from the students’ and instructors’ points of view? • What quality indicators do instructors use to develop and teach their online courses? Background Information The Online Master’s Program for Healthcare Professionals has been offered nationally and internationally since 2002. This advanced, graduate level program was developed as a joint project between the University of Cincinnati College of Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. It targets full-time, working physicians and other health care professionals who wish to pursue careers in medical education. Three educational themes adult learning, curriculum and instruction, and educational research and evaluation are the focus of this 45-credit hour program. This program is offered entirely online, allowing full-time working medical professionals the opportunity to access classes around their work schedule. The curriculum consists of twelve core courses, an elective, a practicum, and a master’s project. Full-time and adjunct faculty of the College of Education teach courses in the program so that healthcare professionals can learn educational pedagogy from educational experts. The faculty in this graduate level program developed their own courses including course materials. Due to budget issues, we were not able to provide formal faculty training on how to teach online or how to use the course platform effectively (Blackboard). However, the first author of this paper, who has had extensive distance learning and computer-based learning experience, oriented each of the faculty one-on-one to the online teaching and learning environment.