The HCC Online Course High Quality Standards Rubric

Official Rubric & Scoring

Here are printable & editable versions of HCC’s Online Course High Quality Standards rubric.

• The official rubric Word document: Online Course High Quality Standards Workbook and a PDF version.
• A single-page printable version of the rubric that links to each standard page in this guide (PDF version).

The rubric contains 73 quality standards. Each standard is worth either 3 points (essential), 2 points (very important), or 1 point (important), for a total of 184 points. Peer reviewers evaluate a course according to whether it meets or does not meet each standard in the rubric. They also provide evidence for their ratings, feedback, and suggestions. For a course to achieve High Quality status, a majority of the peer reviewers must determine that the course meets all the 3 point essential standards and 85% or greater of the total points possible in the rubric (156/184).

The rubric has 10 sections, with corresponding sections in this guide:

1. Course Introduction and Orientation
2. Course Alignment and Organization
3. Course Content and Curriculum
4. Course Activities and Teaching Strategies
5. Assignments, Projects, and Graded Events
6. Course Assessments
7. Evaluation and Feedback
8. Communication
9. Course Technology and Skills
10. Course Accessibility

Handouts and Resources

Here are some related handouts and resources you may find useful:

• You can self-review your course using this Microsoft Form or else see these instructions for doing a self-review using the full HCC rubric in Quality Matters. See also this video.
• Course Pre-Review Checklist – A shorter checklist with links to tutorials for quickly pre-reviewing and addressing course quality issues. This does not cover every item on the full quality rubric.
• HCC Canvas Starter Kit – This is a pre-built Canvas template that you can optionally use to save time building or redesigning your Canvas course. To import it into your Canvas course or sandbox, click the Commons button on the left-hand side of Canvas and search for “HCC Canvas Starter Kit” (see the Canvas Commons guide for tutorials). It has a sample home page, orientation module, and module template you could use as a starting point. See this video for information about how to customize it.

Training Courses

You can find several online course quality training courses in Bridge, including:

• 10 self-paced courses, one for each section of the rubric
• A variety of self-paced courses on accessibility, course mapping & design, etc.
• A variety of live trainings on accessibility, the quality rubric, and other topics