PBSC Online Certification Policies and Certification Guidelines
Course Site Certification and Site Requirements
All Online and Hybrid courses must be certified by the PBSC Online department to qualify for instructional use. Certification of Live Online and Face-to-Face LMS support sites/courses is encouraged, but not required. To achieve certification, the course site must adhere to the following guidelines:
Standard Course Home Page Design – Hybrid & Online
The course home page must consist of a College approved page inclusive of the banner, module tile structure/navigation, resource links/icons, color scheme and contain standard information per College developed and adopted course home page design.
Content & Delivery – Hybrid & Online
Hybrid and Online course content must be organized into Modules, each module containing a related set of instructional content and activities. Modules may be titled as lessons, units, chapters, etc. (per instructor/faculty preference), taking into account the module titles must be descriptive to provide students an effective/intuitive navigation structure to locate desired instructional material.
Modules are to contain at minimum:
- Introduction Page (learning outcomes, outline of the lesson components/requirements, special instructions, reading assignments, etc.)
- Instructional Content (i.e., personal faculty expertise presentations, handouts, videos, resource links, animations, etc.)
- Discussion(s)
- Assessment(s) (i.e., tests, quizzes, assignments, student presentations)
- All other material related to that particular LM/CF (lesson, unit, etc.)
Each Module is to engage students in appropriate student contact time – equivalent to classroom contact time. Traditional homework assignments/time (i.e., reading textbook, writing a term paper, etc.) does not count toward online course instructional contact time.