For my first post of the 2022-23 academic year, I’m joining with countless returning middle and high school students to write an essay about what I did on my summer “vacation.”
I’m happy to report that I was able to travel to Europe. I spent most of my time in Rennes, the largest city in Bretagne, but I was also able to spend eight glorious days in Wien, my favorite city. Sitting in coffeeshops busy with my “vacation,” I found (again) that being surrounded by people speaking mostly German has a restorative effect on my spirit. (Well, that and the Schnitzel at Café Anzengruber.)
Now let’s turn to my “vacation”: I spent 22 days — including all my days in Wien — taking the Quality Matters Certified Peer Reviewer course. Yes, I am now a Certified Peer Reviewer, with all the rights and privileges thereof.
I’ve told this story a few times, and about now in the narrative arc is where people start thinking that I completely lost my grip. What balanced person would voluntarily take a QM certification while on “vacation,” right?
Actually, I found the course interesting — even enlightening. One thing I learned is that many aspects of QM are like beauty: Different people see different things — including what they want to see.
I know that I may sound a bit like a QM commercial, but the fact is, I have a new appreciation for what the QM framework is trying to accomplish. I will admit that I have not lost my deep philosophical conviction that when you take a vivacious principle and establish a set of checkboxes for it, intentionally or not, you’ve crafted that principle’s tombstone. Once we get the checkbox just right, it’s often a matter of time before the principle climbs in the box for burial.
On the other hand, it is plausible to have a tombstone prepared in advance, as it were. And it’s even possible to maintain a reasonable balance between a living principle and box-checking-induced rigor mortis. Let’s try, shall we?
The first thing I want to say about the QM rubric is that, in the hands of a sane reviewer who believes quality matters, it’s about as much threat to academic freedom as the expectation that students use hallways and doors rather than third-floor windows or air-conditioning vents to enter your classroom. Imagine someone whining that “forcing” students to come in through classroom doors is an “intolerable incursion” into a professor’s right to run their classroom as they see fit.
In my mind, unless it’s a firefighter’s course and the “classroom” is a tower rescue simulation, I think it would be very difficult indeed to make that argument stick. When you look at it pragmatically — which means not through the lens of your favorite administration-is-the-enemy trope — the bulk of QM is about course navigation and intelligibility, not substance or pedagogy. Yes, there are those among us who want to dictate more than navigation and intelligibility, and these people co-opt QM for their own ideology. But for the most part, those QM implementers are suffering from an acute case of the fourth paragraph of this little vacation essay.
I like to think that I’m not one of those. After all, though this may be a surprise to some, I have taught philosophy every semester of my Years of Living Deanly.
My own conviction is that academic freedom was never meant as a cover for obscurity for its own sake or an equally obscure form of intellectual hazing. QM fits into that understanding quite well.
For instance, we scholars like to talk about how much we value research, and it so happens that the teaching practices encouraged by nearly all the QM rubrics are in fact based in research about what works — for students. Now we may have a difference of philosophical perspective on whether what’s good for students should count or how much in this discussion, but I’ve put my cards on that particular table in my framework for the Liberal Arts Gateway. Courses that put the student experience at the center of course design are, overall, more effective at educating them. Which, I take it, is our collective mission, even if some of us prefer otherwise.
The other major insight I gleaned from my fellow certification-seekers and our guides was that QM-affiliate institutions use the rubrics in a variety of ways — not just as gatekeeping for who teaches online. There are, I believe, a variety of ways to teach a good distance learning course, even if there are some practices a responsible course should attempt to instantiate. Like, giving students contact information so they can reach you or ensuring that assessments actually assess the stated learning outcomes.
Let’s bring that last point home. Suppose I announced that I am personally going to evaluate your performance as a professor. I give you the date and time of your evaluation — and that’s it. What criteria will I use? Oh, they’re in my head, and you’ll know when you get your results.
I fancy that most of you would like to know in advance what the criteria for evaluation will be, and most of you are pretty interested in me actually using those criteria, rather than something in my head that day, to evaluate your work. If you are one of those “most,” then you’ll see the value of what QM calls “alignment” of assessments to learning outcomes. It’s really a matter of doing to students what we would have done to ourselves, assessment-wise.
Now, I can already hear the objection echoing that “reducing” the value of your course to something as pedestrian as “learning outcomes” could never capture the value of your course. Actually, I agree completely. Some of my former students, people I’ve run into at gas pumps or the vegetable aisle squeezing avocados, have told me exactly the same thing.
A course is like a relationship, a friendship. Can we reduce a friendship to a checklist without losing sight of the value of the friendship itself? I seriously doubt it. But here’s a question for us scholars to ponder: Does it follow from the assumption that the value of a friendship cannot be exhaustively captured by a checklist that there are no criteria at all that are useful in assessing that relationship? If you’re tempted to answer yes, then let me ask you something: How do you know when (or if) you have a friend?
So, why did I spend my “vacation” getting certified as a QM peer reviewer? I have two responses: First, I’m curious and oppositional, and I wanted to test for myself the many vehemently held opinions about what QM is and isn’t. I’m satisfied that I have a much better perspective on those opinions — and their merits.
But I had a more practical reason. I want instructional leaders to decide who is and who is not eligible to teach distance learning in my division, and I wanted to come at that challenge with an informed and thoughtful perspective.
I’m satisfied about that, too.
Stay tuned.
Oh, yeah. In case you’re wondering, I’m not joking:
