Internet Learning Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2014 | Page 97

Beliefs Regarding Faculty Participation
Quality Matters (QM) is one of the
most widely accepted set of standards
guiding the online course
design quality. As of 2013, QM reported
over 600 member institutions, and over
22,000 faculty and instructional designers
trained on the QM standards and course
review process (Quality Matters, 2013).
The core of the QM approach is a rubric
covering eight overarching student/learner
focused standards, with a total of 41 specific
course design standards. To ascertain
whether an online course meets these standards,
a faculty developer submits a course
to the faculty peer review process. The
goal of this process is continuous course
improvement so that any identified weaknesses
are corrected, based on constructive
peer feedback (Finley, 2012).
When initiating a peer review of online
courses, subscribing institutions have
the option to participate in either official
QM reviews or unofficial internal reviews.
Official QM reviews include a Master Reviewer,
a Subject Matter Expert, and an external
Reviewer who constitute the peer review
committee, and successful completion
of the process leads to the official QM designation
as a quality assured course. Unofficial
reviews do not receive the QM designation,
but they allow institutions to select
their own peer review committee members
to accommodate unique institutional needs
and course improvement goals. Both official
QM reviews and internal peer reviews
are governed by the same set of standards
and consensus protocols for determining
when standards are met.
The choice to participate in official
versus unofficial reviews is determined at
the institutional level, along with the policy
of mandated versus voluntary peer review.
For institutions undergoing an organizational
change to implement QM, offering
participation in an unofficial internal peer
review on a voluntary basis is a way to gain
faculty buy-in in the process. Obviously,
when participation is not optional, faculty
members do not need to accept or endorse
the process to prompt participation, but
when the process is optional, what prompts
faculty members to participate in the peer
review? More specifically, what do faculty
members believe about the peer review
process when it is implemented at their
institution? How are these beliefs related
to plans to participate? How can beliefs be
used to modify procedures with the goal of
increasing participation rates? To provide
initial answers to these questions and guide
our QM implementation process, the present
research investigated faculty beliefs regarding
the introduction and first wave of
reviews in a QM peer review process. The
goal of this research was to improve our
understanding of faculty beliefs regarding
voluntary completion of a peer review of an
online course so that revisions to our process
and new institutional changes could be
designed to increase faculty participation
and ultimately improve our online course
quality.
Literature Review
To systematically investigate faculty
beliefs and plans to participate in a
peer review, the Theory of Planned
Behavior provided a logical theoretical
basis for this study because it targets volitional
behaviors and directly examines salient
beliefs regarding the behavior. Ajzen’s
Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1985,
1991, 2012) is one of the most widely applied
behavior prediction models in the social
psychology literature. In a recent reflection,
Ajzen (2011) noted that the theory
was cited 22 times in 1985, and citations
have grown steadily to 4,550 in 2010. A review
of the model’s significance found this
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