I have gone to this annual conference several times. It is a wonderful experience because there are a number of faculty and instructional designers who are looking at ‘quality’ from which to frame online course design. The Quality Matters rubric, which consists of 8 essential standards and 41 specific standards guide faculty and designers to build a quality online course. I love the ideas behind the Quality Matters program  because of its attention to continuous design  As many of you teachers know, your course is never finished. We design a course, test it out with our students, tweak it during the year or semester, then redesign. We also integrate technology where it most makes sense for the learner. The technologies alone make redesign a continuous activity. It’s all good! Most teachers are lifelong learners. This is why we do what we do…learning about our students, our course design and technologies, and ourselves is inevitable in this process.

My goal for this conference is to network with others about similar design issues or teaching issues and to co-present with a few colleagues.  I am co-presenting with Dr. Sipai Klein who I got to know better when we coauthored a chapter about intercultural communication in an LMS in Culture, Communication and Cyperspace. Our topic: What does research say about accessibility and universal design?  Another presentation will be with Dr. Becky Adams from the University of NM and Dr. Krista Kozel of NMSU-Dona Ana Community College. We will tour through our courses to show design elements as a result of formal reviews by certified peer reviewers.  Finally, as a  Research Colleague, I will be co-presenting with Dr. Kay Shattuck about how the research informs the Quality Matters standards. This should be fun as we will be using a Jeopardy game to sweeten the topic.

I will report back about aha moments which I am sure I’ll find lot.