Faculty Gold and Online Quality
Assurance at CCCOnline

Introduction and Overview [ Table of Contents ]

The basis for instructional practices at CCCOnline is the “Best Practices for Electronically Offered Degree Programs,” developed by the Western Cooperative of Higher Education (WCET, www.WCET.info) and adopted by all higher-education accreditation agencies in the US.

Value #1 from this Best Practices document states the following:

Education is best experienced within a community of learning where competent professionals are actively and cooperatively involved with creating, providing, and improving the instructional program.

As this quotation suggests, teaching by “competent professionals” is CCCOnline's most vital activity. Our goal is to continually revise and support best practices among our faculty. Supporting and honoring excellence in teaching remains the central focus of our organization, and this focus is fostered by our quality-assurance process, detailed below.

A best practices “community of learning” is built through the interactions between students and faculty, students and their peers, and students and the content. When participating in an online class students have two distinct forms of interaction with faculty. First, they meet the faculty through the content the faculty and the course provide. Second, they interact with the faculty as the faculty comes online (into the classroom space) to facilitate the course. Good practice thus suggests that well-designed quality guidelines will address both these areas of contact - the online materials and the "classroom" interaction - and that those guidelines will also emphasize the professional development of faculty. For purposes of faculty evaluations the CCCOnline quality-assurance process focuses primarily on student/faculty interaction.

CCCOnline’s formal quality-assurance program was developed following interviews with faculty and students and a review of the research around quality practices in online learning. The faculty portion of the quality-assurance program includes the evaluation of the following faculty practices and uses of course tools:

• Syllabus
• Schedule
• Discussion
• Announcements
• Grade-book

In addition the faculty evaluation process includes a portion of the results from the student survey (those questions focused on faculty performance only) and faculty participation and completion of professional development workshops.

As part of a presentation on course quality for the 2005 Teaching in Community Colleges Online conference, Alice Bedard-Voorhees, Associate Dean of Academics, mapped the chapters of the CCCOnline Quality Assurance (QA) manual to the best practices in online education developed by WICHE (Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, www.WICHE.edu). The map is available online at:

If you are interested in the complete QA manual it is available for purchase to educational and business entities and at no cost to CCCOnline faculty (electronic format only).

Teaching is CCCOnline's most vital activity. Our goal is to continually revise and support our best practices such that supporting and honoring excellence in teaching remains the central focus of our organization.