Quality Matters Day: Standard 1.6

It’s Quality Matters Day! Each week, we highlight a Quality Matters standard and review its importance in an online course and how we evaluate this standard.

Today, we are reviewing Quality Matters Standards 1.6.

General Standard 1 addresses the course overview and introduction.

Click here to view Quality Matters Standard 1.6 in the Quality Matters Rubric.

Standard 1.6 addresses the inclusion of prerequisite courses/knowledge/competencies in your course.

Quality Matters Standard 1.6 discussed at www.FacultyeCommons.com

• In this case, the word ‘prerequisites,’ can be deceptively simple. While your initial instinct might be to whip together a short checklist of courses a student should have passed prior to being admitted to yours, QM wants instructors to also think of prerequisite knowledge related to their discipline, along with “any [other] required competencies.” In other words, you might want to consider discipline-related competencies that are imperative for learners to have mastered, or at least encountered, in order for them to be successful in your course/program. For example, if I was teaching a business statistics course, I would probably want students to know that they needed a firm grasp on foundational mathematics. Likewise, as a Psychology professor, it might be important for me to let students know they should be fluent in APA style due to the frequency of paper writing projects they’ll have during the semester.

• Including prerequisite competencies helps set student expectations for the kind of work they’ll be encountering, let’s them know what skills they might need to brush up on, or in some cases, encourages them to return to the course at a later date after they’ve attained the knowledge they need.

AP Guidance: In order to meet standard 1.6, remember to work beyond the course checklist and include all of the foundation knowledge/competencies that are required of students in an area they’ll encounter at the beginning of the course!

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