Current Practices and Needs Assessment of Instructors in an Online Masters Degree in Education for Healthcare Professionals: A First Step to the Development of Quality Standards

Instructional quality of online delivery is still a common concern. Quality assurance requires a comprehensive framework of several perspectives of learners' and instructors' needs including critical analysis of their teaching and learning practices with the course technology platform. Using online surveys and semi-structured interviews with 10 instructors and 29 students, this case study investigated current instructional practice, needs, and achievements of the instructors and students in an Online Masters Program for Healthcare Professionals. Although the findings indicated little real concern about the program quality, a majority of our instructors and students still believed that initiating specific course design and teaching standards in our program would maximize instructors' and students' performancein our future courses. The process we followed in this study encouraged a helpful dialogue about program expectations, including training expectations of instructors and course design/development and teaching standards (best practices) for the online master's program. We became more conscious that applying standards successfully requires more support from the instructors.