Introducing Our New Media Assessment Rubrics

Instructional media (images, video, and audio content) helps students visualize topics, practice skills central to a course, and allows them to interact with content in a variety of ways. At its best, high-quality instructional media “engages students, aids student retention of knowledge, motivates interest in the subject matter, and illustrates the relevance of many concepts” (Mateer, Ghent, Porter, et al., n.d.). Our eLearning team at SAU takes high-quality instructional content seriously, and we are currently developing new ways to determine the quality of media used in our courses.

Adding the rubrics to our existing processes

For the past few months, I worked with the team to develop instructional media rubrics to ensure our courses meet or exceed best practices in curriculum and instruction. These rubrics assess specific criteria in instructional images, audio, and videos. These rubrics are intended for our instructional designers (ID), Assistant Instructional Designer (AID), and subject matter experts (SME) to assess the current instructional media for each course and determine if they follow best practices in instructional design.

The AID will “score” a course’s instructional media using the rubrics and provide detailed feedback on how instructional media can be improved. This will be in conjunction with our typical quality assurance (QA) process when developing or re-developing courses. The QA process allows for basic checks of a course’s functionality, navigation, and more. These rubrics will fill any existing gaps in our QA checklist.

Instructional designers will use the feedback from the QA and instructional media rubric scores in order to continue in later-phase developments of courses. The ID will make or suggest changes to the SME to improve the quality of course overall. Using these suggestions, the SME will work with the ID and their department to improve existing instructional media or find instructional media more closely meets or exceeds criteria addressed in the Media Assessment Rubrics.

Rubric criteria

Each rubric assesses the following criteria:

• Quality
• Content
• Accessibility
• Copyright
• Hosting

The quality criteria consider the overall production of a piece of instructional media, and it allows for primary sources (relevant to the course) which might be of a lower quality. The content criteria assess the extent to which the instructional media aligns with course learning objectives and the curriculum. The third criteria category is accessibility. While our team already assesses courses for accessibility in the QA process, this criteria focuses on the accessibility best practices specific to each media type. We included copyright as the fourth criteria. This assesses copyright compliance, and checks if we properly cite the original source and creator. The final criteria category is hosting, which provides sustainability to our content. We highly recommend media is hosted by eLearning, Spring Arbor University, or hosted with permission by the copyright holder.

The rubrics include four levels of proficiency for each of the categories on the rubrics: Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze. Platinum is considered to “meet and exceed expectations” while Gold is “meeting expectations.” Silver can be considered to “partially meet expectations or approaching expectations” while Bronze is “not meeting expectations.” While it may not be feasible for every piece of media to meet “Platinum” proficiency in each category, it may be reasonable to ensure media meets at least the “Gold” standard in each category.

Images

We developed the instructional media rubric for images first. While the criteria for Copyright and Hosting are similar or identical to the rubrics for videos and audio, the Images rubric has very specific criteria in other areas. For example, the quality and accessibility categories consider contrast levels in images.

Video

We developed the video rubric next. This rubric includes specific criteria for Quality to address factors such as audio mixing, cuts, and pacing. These criteria also outline accessibility expectations for closed captioning and timestamps.

Table 2:

Video Evaluation Rubric

Audio

We developed the Audio rubric last. This rubric shares many similarities with the video rubric. For example, we recommend a maximum run time of 30 minutes in both rubrics.

Table 3:

Audio Evaluation Rubric

Final Thoughts

Evaluating instructional media ensures we use quality multimedia aligned with sound pedagogy. It helps learners meet learning outcomes and objectives. In a future post, Kyle and I will discuss how we collaborated after the rubrics’ development to design tutorial videos to help the eLearning team and SME’s assess the level to which instructional media meets the guidelines. We are excited to share this ongoing project with you all!

References

Mateer, G.D., Ghent, L.S., Porter, T., Purdom, R. (n.d.). Using media to enhance teaching and learning. Pedagogy in action: the SERC portal for educators.