As an instructional designer, I often take on a consultant role, using structured review tools to help faculty identify high-impact revisions to their online and technology-enhanced courses. Below is an anonymized excerpt from a review I conducted using the OSCQR (Online Course Quality Review) Rubric, a widely used framework for evaluating course design, accessibility, and pedagogy.
On Learning Outcomes (OSCQR Standard 9)
You provide excellent support and guidance to the online learner, especially in outlining expectations and how to get started. Your welcome message is warm, clear, and sent with enough notice that students can use it to prepare before the course begins.
One area to focus on next is explicitly stating the learning outcomes: how will students demonstrate that they’ve learned what you intended? You undoubtedly have outcomes in mind — they show up in your assessments and unit themes — but it’s important to draw them out and state them in specific, measurable terms. For example: “By the end of this unit, you should be able to explain the relationship between force, mass, and acceleration using Newton’s Second Law.”
Consider using a “backward design” approach to draw out your main learning goals based on the activities you have outlined, and then drill down to specific objectives for each unit. This strengthens the connection between what students are doing (labs, problem sets, discussions) and what they’re expected to know by the end.
On Accessibility (Course Content)
You share content scanned from textbooks, which is common, but scanned PDFs are inaccessible to students using screen readers and require some remediation. One option is to look for an already-digitized version (librarians are a great resource here). Another is scanning with OCR (optical character recognition) technology, which allows assistive technology to interpret the text, but it’s not always 100% accurate. This is a widely shared challenge, not one unique to your course, but worth addressing as you continue to build out content.
On Assessment Design (OSCQR Standard 46)
Consider adding a rubric for the lab report assignment that gets at the level of learning you want students to demonstrate. For example, requiring students to explain the relevance of the experiment, the underlying physics principles at play, and how their results compare to expected theoretical outcomes. This helps further define what “mastery” looks like for both you and your students. Your sample lab report is a great model of exemplary work. Consider highlighting why it’s exemplary, or letting the rubric do that work for you.
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