Two things especially separate a high-quality online course from a content dump. The first is instructor presence: announcements, feedback, participation in discussion, and visible engagement that tell students a real person is teaching. The second is regular and substantive interaction between instructor and students, which is both pedagogically important and, for distance education in the United States, a federal requirement that quality rubrics such as OSCQR address directly.

Online accessibility deserves a specific check too, since an online course lives or dies by whether every student can use it. Reviewing presence, interaction, and accessibility, and then running a formal pass with Quality Matters or OSCQR, gives an online course the thorough review it needs.