Online and hybrid courses work better when there is some shared language for what makes a course function. Faculty should not have to reinvent the basic questions every time they build or revise a course, and students should not have to relearn a completely different organizational logic every time they walk into a new class. A good course-quality framework gives an institution a consistent way to talk about that: whether the course makes its expectations clear, whether the assessments reflect what students are supposed to learn, whether the materials and activities support those goals, and whether students can navigate the experience without hitting unnecessary barriers.
The trouble starts when that framework stops being a shared language and turns into an inspection regime. Quality Matters, OSCQR, and locally built rubrics can all surface real improvements. But the same rubric feels completely different depending on what happens after someone fills it out. If the result is a score that goes to a dean, a list of deficiencies an instructor is expected to close, or one more thing to document for compliance, faculty have every reason to experience the whole process as an audit. If the result is a conversation with a knowledgeable colleague, a manageable set of improvements, and real help making them, the review becomes something genuinely useful. A form of professional practice rather than a performance review.
A framework should give people something to talk about
Quality Matters is widely used across higher education and organizes its review around alignment between learning objectives, assessment, materials, and activities. OSCQR, developed within the SUNY system, takes a more open, iterative approach designed in part for instructors to review their own courses. Institutions also commonly adapt established frameworks into shorter, local versions reflecting their own LMS, accessibility requirements, and academic context. The specific framework matters less than the questions it lets people ask each other.
Those questions are valuable precisely because they move the conversation away from taste. A reviewer saying a course feels confusing is offering an opinion. A reviewer asking whether a student can determine what to do next without hunting through several pages is identifying something concrete and examinable. Likewise, asking whether an assessment measures the stated learning objective is far more productive than arguing over whether an assignment is “good.” A shared framework hands faculty and instructional staff a vocabulary for these conversations, without pretending there is one correct way to teach every subject.
That distinction matters especially in higher education, because consistency and uniformity are not the same thing. Students benefit from predictable navigation, clear expectations, and accessible materials. But none of that requires every course to share the same intellectual structure, or every instructor to teach the same way. A useful quality framework locks in the conditions that genuinely matter while leaving real room for faculty to decide how those conditions get met.
Begin with the person who teaches the course
A review that starts by asking what the instructor is trying to accomplish, and what is getting in the way, produces a different conversation than one that starts by checking boxes against a rubric. The rubric is still there and still does its work, but it functions as a shared reference point for the conversation rather than the point of the conversation itself.
The review is part of a larger system
Course review works especially well once an institution has already taken responsibility for the things it can standardize. An accessible course template establishes good structural defaults from the start. A working captioning process makes accessible media far easier to produce. A clear set of LMS patterns cuts down the time faculty spend solving basic navigation problems from scratch. Faculty development can address assessment, interaction, and Universal Design for Learning directly. The review then has room to focus on the decisions that genuinely require the instructor’s own expertise.
That division of labor matters. An institution should not ask faculty to individually compensate for shortcomings in the systems around them, and it should not treat a quality rubric as a substitute for building those systems in the first place. The most effective course-quality programs make good practice easier, while still preserving the instructor’s authority over the actual teaching.
Ultimately, the measure of a course review is not how many standards got marked “met.” It is whether the instructor came away with a clearer sense of the student’s experience, whether the conversation surfaced something genuinely worth changing, and whether the institution made that change possible. A quality framework can help with all three. But only if it stays a tool for professional judgment, rather than becoming the judgment itself.
Charlie Wrightmann is a consultant at Wrightmann Education Technologists. Part of the Learning Platforms series.
References
- Quality Matters. Higher Education Rubric. https://www.qualitymatters.org/qa-resources/rubric-standards
- Open SUNY. OSCQR Course Design Review. https://oscqr.suny.edu/
- CAST. Universal Design for Learning Guidelines. https://udlguidelines.cast.org/