Quality Matters Spotlight: Douglass Tatum

The Office of Digital Learning congratulates Douglass Tatum, CPA, for the high-quality certification of his online course, ENT 3423: Funding Sources for Entrepreneurial Opportunities. Tatum, teaching faculty and entrepreneur in residence at the Jim Moran College of Entrepreneurship, received his master of accounting at Florida State University. He participated in the FSU Online Quality Initiative, where online courses undergo a rigorous peer-review process based on the nationally recognized Quality Matters rubric. In the following Q&A, Tatum shares his insights about the certification process.

How do you think the Quality Matters (QM) review process has improved your course?
The process improved the course in several ways:

• To start with, the mapping ensured that I became uber aware of the learning objectives in each module – very much like setting a strategy first and then ensuring that the tactics line up.
• One of the biggest improvements was the module summaries and the help the team provided me with, making sure I was linking the modules to logical next steps. I believe it cut down a lot on any confusion a student might have about when and what to do next.
• We also did an accessibility exercise and found that many of the videos did not have captions – those were corrected.

What did you value most about the instructional design support you received from your ODL faculty liaison?
The team was super helpful, organized, and available when I needed to gain some direction.

What did you value most about the accessibility support you received from your ODL course design specialist?
Identifying how much of the course was not accessible – it takes some real technical expertise to fix those issues, and the team was super helpful in helping me get the parts of the course that were not accessible fixed.

If you were to encourage a peer to participate in the QM review process, how would you communicate its value?
Beyond the fact that I believe the course is much better organized and tightly focused, getting a course through the process will, in my opinion, greatly reduce the amount of confusion from some students who inevitably seem to get lost on the sequence and cadence of the course.

Would you be willing to share any positive feedback you received from your students about your certified course?
The following is feedback from Fall 2025 course evaluations.

• The videos provided in the course are very informative as well as the Yellowdig [posts] where you can discuss with other students.
• I found the weekly Yellowdig posts insightful and fun to participate in!
• Listening to the videos and interviews, as well as terms given each week, [are valuable for learning].

For information about online course design and the FSU Online Quality Initiative, visit odl.fsu.edu/quality.