Forming Your Team

We recommend forming a POCR Team made up of the key stakeholders from across your campus. Involving these stakeholders in a collaborative approach to planning and launching your POCR process will help ensure a successful implementation. 

We recommend a minimum of 4-6 reviewers on each team.

Consider how your review team will handle accessibility. Will all reviewers be trained in accessibility, will the college have one or two trained accessibility reviewers, or does your college have an accessibility specialist who can review course accessibility? 

Who else should be on your POCR Team? It will depend a lot on how online learning is managed on your campus, but a few things to consider when forming your team:

1. Academic Senate - your team may be a sub-committee or workgroup of your local Academic Senate. If not, we recommend that at least one member of your POCR Team serve as a bridge to your senate so that they are consulted, informed, and engaged as you develop your program.
2. Curriculum Committee - you may already be using some type of review, addendum, and/or rubric in your Distance Education approval process. If so, be sure that your Local POCR process aligns with and builds upon what you already have in place.
3. Deans and your chief instructional officer - You may want to consider having someone on your POCR Team who represents administration. Deans in particular, with right of assignment, should be informed on how peer online course review can benefit students and the value of making scheduling and assignment decisions with this quality in mind.
4. Canvas administration - depending on how Canvas permissions are set up in your instance, a Canvas Admin may need to be involved in giving reviewers access to courses. You Canvas Admin should be kept informed of the review process or can be a part of the team.
5. Support - instructors will need varying levels of support after their courses are reviewed to align to the rubric and make accessibility fixes. This support may come from an instructional designer, an accessibility specialist, a fellow instructor with more experience, etc. Consider inviting folks on your campus who can share their skills and expertise, regardless of whether or not they are in an “official” support role.

Consider having one instructor from each department (or at least one from each division) be part of your college’s review team.

This allows for:

• A review to be done by someone from a different discipline (highly recommended).
• The sharing of ideas, pedagogical innovations, and Canvas best practices to be shared across disciplines.
• A community of practice around quality course design that extends across departments and divisions.

And of course, there is your college’s Distance Education Committee. If you have one, they might serve as your de facto POCR Team. Just be sure to look at the makeup of the committee to see if the membership can serve the needs described above.

Ideas to Build Your Review Team

Identify Resources

We recommend that your team begins by identifying the resources that will be needed to develop, implement, and sustain your program. Consider:

• What campus resources, services or personnel already exist that your local process or team can tap into?
• What resources for Peer Online Course Review need to be developed?
• Is there a way to pool or share resources between campuses in your district or region?
• What help will you need from CVC@ONE?

Resources can include...

Expertise/skill sets:

• Canvas
• Instructional design
• Graphic design
• Video creation and captioning
• Accessibility training for instructors to create accessible pages and documents for review (and remediation when applicable)

You may also have faculty at your college who have had their courses reviewed and aligned. These people can serve as a valuable resource as you build your program!

Funding

Consider sources of funding that can help sustain your program and reward participation. With limited funding, your team should also consider how to prioritize alignment of courses, such as focusing on high-enrollment, high-impact courses needed for transfer. Sources that some Consortium schools have reported using include:

• Professional development funds
• Equity funding
• Program review funding
• CTE/Workforce funds (for CTE-related courses)
• Adult Education Block Grants
• Nursing/Health Care categorical funding