Page 23 - 2020 OIT Progress Report

SPECIAL “OPS” – ONLINE PRODUCTION SERVICES: SMU’S NEWEST SHARED ACADEMIC TECHNOLOGY SERVICE
Now more than ever, universities and their faculty rely on specialized services and support partners with expertise, not just in the technologies
of teaching, also in building high-quality
online courses and in developing educational multimedia. Last year OIT assumed the responsibility of bringing together a team of digital course designers and media developers. This year has marked the transformation of this team into an exciting (and timely) new campus shared service in the form of OIT’s Online Production Services (OPS) group.
Initially formed to supply instructional design and video services exclusively to SMU’s new fully online graduate programs, the OPS team, under the leadership of Simmons’ Senior Academic Technology Services Director, Dr. Jennifer Culver, has blossomed into an agile development group
capable of answering any digital instructional design challenge. While this team has worked
to expand and to define what course production and design services mean for SMU, several key improvements underscore the value of how this team is scaling and adapting to meet the needs of faculty.
First, supported by leadership from OIT and SMU Global & Online, this group worked to adopt and to implement a new baseline system of online course quality standards for SMU. The OPS team secured SMU’s partnership with the nationally-recognized Quality Matters (QM) quality assurance system— ensuring that faculty have access to the highest quality online teaching and design training as well as access to course evaluation benchmarks and rubrics that ensure SMU courses meet and exceed the needs of SMU learners.
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