QM: Exploring Your Institutional Policies

This winter I am working toward adding a new credential to my learning: Quality Matter's Teaching Online Certificate. This well-established and highly respected organization has put together a series of workshops that focuses on best practices of online teaching. I plan to reflect on each workshop as I complete them as a way to model metacognition. This post is 6 of 8.

In the Evaluating Your Institutional Policies workshop we had the opportunity to explore both public-facing and internal policies our institutions have in place. As someone new to Triton College, this was extremely helpful for me. Many of these policies don’t directly relate to my position as Director of Distance Learning so having a dedicated block of time to explore these will allow me to reflect on suggestions I’d like to make for our online learning programs. Having an opportunity to explore classroom behavior, academic integrity, learner privacy, copyright, and accessibility policies as well as others helped served as a reminder that having policies in place allows both the learner and the instructor to focus on instruction and keep things equitable. 

One of the most interesting things I learned was that the instructor has much say in determining if a students should be removed for disruptive behavior. This shouldn’t be a surprise- our institution is a community college. Coming from a career in K-12, this isn’t always the case so seeing this was interesting to me.

In terms of the most surprising thing I learned, it wasn’t a policy but more of a discovery. When researching my institution’s policies, there was essentially no use of the word “online” in any of the policies and nothing that alluded to 'modalities.' It’s understandable as we are still building our online program but is something that needs to be addressed the more we add courses.

This isn’t something I will do immediately, but in the future as we add more online and hybrid courses I will work with our Online Education Technology Committee to determine what policies need to be amended or created so our students are clear about the expectations.

One of the most useful resources I explored was a faculty guide created by our Center for Access and Accommodative Services department. This guide does a nice job of listing examples of classroom accommodations and best practices in supporting learners with disabilities. I appreciate that the tone was positive and focused on what to do to help our learners succeed.

Finally, I don’t know what I don’t know about other institutional policies that I’d like to explore, but in this workshop, we received some great examples of university policies. My plan in the near future is to spend more time looking through these resources to see if we are missing any important pieces.