Maximizing learning and teaching by bringing together the best in people and technology.
Meet Quality Matters
In the digital age, with the full power of the internet at our fingertips, anybody can make an online course. But how do you know if your students are getting a quality education?
This is the challenge that Quality Matters (QM) has set out to solve. Since 2003, this organization has been answering the question: How do we measure and guarantee the quality of a course?
Today, QM provides professional development, a set of rubrics, and a course peer review process that function together to improve the quality of K-12 online and blended courses across the country. QM has received national recognition for its approach to continuous improvement in online education and student learning.
Michigan Virtual partners with QM to evaluate the quality of our courses and provide professional development to staff to ensure we're offering the best online learning experience possible to our students.
Why Our Courses are QM-Certified
Every new course we create is designed by an expert instructional designer and aligned to national quality standards for online learning. Despite this, we still find it important to have an unbiased third-party — in this case, Quality Matters — provide feedback and certification through a rigorous peer-review process to ensure quality.
Our students deserve the best online learning experience possible. As such, many of our courses have been awarded QM-certification, a number that grows every year as we continue to update our course catalog and design new online courses to engage Michigan students.
In 2017, we received the Quality Matters Make a Difference for Students Award for Outstanding Impact by a K-12 Organization. In receiving this award, Michigan Virtual was recognized for “identifying a statewide need for a stronger online course quality assurance process. Implementation of the QM process through extensive staff development and official course reviews has fostered a common focus on quality assurance throughout the organization.”
In 2025, Michigan Virtual was recognized through the leadership of Instructional Design Manager, Marisa Wier, who received the Quality Matters Outstanding Impact by a K-12 Individual Award. This honor highlighted our organization’s success in creating a sustainable and collaborative process for advancing student-facing courses through rigorous QM certification. By embedding QM standards into course development and fostering strong cross-team collaboration, Marisa and her colleagues have strengthened instructional design practices, expanded the number of QM-certified courses, and ensured that students across Michigan experience consistent, accessible, and engaging online learning.
"It is nice to be formally recognized by a national organization focused on quality for our efforts to improve online learning for Michigan schools and students. In addition to taking steps to advance our own course development process, we have leveraged our partnership with Quality Matters to help local and intermediate districts use national standards as they expand efforts to design and develop online course content."
— Jamey Fitzpatrick, President & CEO of Michigan Virtual
“Our ongoing partnership with Quality Matters continues to provide a solid foundation for our Instructional Design team and instructors to build and teach high quality online courses. We are able to continually learn and grow our practices knowing that we're starting from a place of quality and improving from there.”
— Holly Filkins, Assistant Director of Instructional Product Development at Michigan Virtual
National Standards for Quality Online Learning
Can we come to a national consensus about what constitutes quality online learning?
In 2019, Quality Matters and the Virtual Learning Leadership Alliance (VLLA) sought to accomplish this by coming together to release a revised version of the National Standards for Quality Online Learning, which previously had been last updated in 2011 by iNACOL (now FullScale).
Here at Michigan Virtual, we’re honored to have had the opportunity to contribute to the latest edition of these standards. These standards — including those for online teaching, online courses, and online programs — were revised based on extensive literature reviews, community feedback via surveys, and the expertise of online learning experts around the globe.
You can learn more about the National Quality Standards for Online Learning by taking our professional development course series that overviews these standards and offers practical strategies for implementing them in the online classroom.