Design Process

Commitment to Excellence

The Florida Online Course Design Quality Review process was created to align with the statewide initiative set by the Florida Board of Governors 2025 Plan for Online Education. Digital Learning facilitates this standards-based process, which relies on the USF Quality Online Rubric.

The USF Quality Online Rubric supports the creation and continuous improvement of high-quality online courses at USF. The rubric includes eight General Standards and 51 “Green” and “Gold” Specific Review Standards that describe best practices in online course design. Green design standards align with the Florida Online Quality Review guidelines and Gold design standards promote increased engagement and interaction, community building, social presence, and real-world application. A high-quality Green or Gold designation is a significant accomplishment that means an online course has met rigorous, research-based standards of course design.

Throughout the course development process, InEd’s Learning Designers use the USF Quality Online Rubric as a roadmap. They provide recommendations and design support in alignment with the standards and conduct an in-process prototype and final quality review of the completed course. Once the course is complete, faculty will participate in the final review process as a subject matter expert (SME) by completing a self-review of their online course.

A Focus on Design

Many factors play a part in a quality learning experience for students, but the USF Quality Online Rubric focuses most on course design. Course design is the planning that goes into the course while course delivery is what happens once the course starts. For example, an instructor may have included a series of discussion boards to promote student interaction in the course.

The course review process will consider:

• how the discussion boards align with the overall course learning outcomes and assessments. 
• instructions for how students are expected to participate.
• guidelines/criteria for how students will be graded.
• how this communication tool fits into the overall use and alignment of the other tools and media in the course.

The quality review process does not consider what occurs in the discussion board in terms of student exchanges with the instructor, how often the instructor participates, or what the instructor writes.