As we shared yesterday, CLRN’s review process strives to be fair, unbiased, and non punitive. The CLRN Certification process is one way to shine a light on those courses that meet most of the course and online standards. With CLRN being a state-funded service, we do not charge for our review services. Still, course reviews are time and resource intensive, particularly when you’re striving to be thorough and consistent. While we hope all publishers will continue to improve their courses to be more interactive, engaging, and responsive, we’re unable to conduct full reviews of the same course when publishers slightly improve a course to better meet the standards. Because we want to continue to offer our services at no cost, we’ve modified our policies to provide publishers a narrow window when they’ve made specific improvements to meet the CLRN Certified criteria. Our new policy is listed below.

Secondary Review: New evidence for content or online course standards.

When CLRN’s review teams examine a course for its alignment to content standards and to iNACOL’s Standards for Quality Online Courses, they utilize publisher-provided correlation documents, also known as standards maps. These detail where reviewers should find evidence to confirm a standard’s presence. When a standard is not fully met, CLRN review teams provide a comment about components that are missing.

Once CLRN’s review is complete, we inform publishers that the course review will be published in seven calendar days. At this point, publishers may notify CLRN to publish the review immediately or they may allow the seven days to proceed with CLRN publishing the review afterwards.

However, if a publisher believes that there is new evidence, not previously submitted, that would clarify our review, they should notify CLRN during the seven-day window. CLRN will place a “hold” on the review and will schedule a secondary review for the specific standards for which the publisher provides new evidence. Once this secondary review is completed, CLRN will again inform publishers that the review will be published in seven days.  Each course is allowed one secondary review.

Supplemental Update: New content and/or course standards.

Once a course review is published online, CLRN generally does not allow the resource to be re-reviewed for three years unless there is a major update to the course. However, in the case of courses that have not met the qualifications to be CLRN-Certified, CLRN may re-review courses provided the following:

1. Publishers have augmented the course to strengthen its alignment to the content standards and/or the course standards. Sufficient changes have been made to bring the course into compliance with the CLRN-Certified specifications.
2. Publishers provide specific evidence and locations about the standards that have been added or strengthened.

CLRN’s first priority during review sessions is to examine new course reviews. CLRN will conduct supplemental updates on a space available basis. Courses will remain in their published state during this time and publishers will be notified of the review results. No secondary review is available for supplemental updates. One supplemental update is permitted per course per year.

Major Course Update.

Courses that have experienced a major update contain substantially new content to meet the Common Core State Standards or California’s original content standards. The course’s structure, media integration, degree of interactivity and engagement, and learning management system have been significantly improved to better meet iNACOL’s course standards, particularly the 11 Instructional Design standards.

Major Course Updates are considered new courses and are reviewed in the order they are received.