| MarylandOnline developed the Quality Matters (QM) program to evaluate online courses using a rubric that communicates and measures expectations, criteria, and levels of quality. Education stakeholders include instructional designers, online instructors, online students, administrators, and accrediting agencies. Online instructors may not have instructional design skills necessary to evaluate whether course designers have implemented instructional design principles in an online course. However, instructional designers are experts in the implementation of technology, instructional design processes, and instructional design principles. The purpose of this study was to determine if an association exists between the overall evaluations of alignment in an online course as measured by the QM Rubric for online instructors and instructional designers. Utilizing the QM Rubric to evaluate an online course, scores obtained from the evaluations by 10 instructional designers were compared to the scores obtained from the evaluations by 10 online instructors. According to the quantitative analysis, the results of the chi-square test of independence indicated no association between the overall evaluations of alignment in an online course as measured by the QM Rubric for online instructors and instructional designers, p = .170. To show a significant difference, the p value must be less than .05, p < .05. Though the study showed no significant difference, there are limitations that affected the outcome of the research design. The limitations included the small sample size, the lack of accessibility of the QM Rubric with annotations, the limitation of the type of data the research design could produce, and the lack of verification of the qualifications of the participants of the study. |
