Quality Assurance in Distance Education

Starting in the early 1980’s, quality has become a key theme in education. The reasons are not hard to find. Higher education is witnessing rapid changes like shift from elite system to ‘massification’, more diverse learner groups joining higher education, importance of education and training in the new knowledge society, emergence of private providers, growing internationalization of education, shrinking public investment and a general perception that educational institutions are far from successful in serving the needs of the society in which they function. The recent emphasis on Quality Assurance (QA) can be attributed, on the one hand, to Government interest in demonstration of “responsible and relevant activities undertaken with the tax payer’s money” and, on the other, to the growing doubts concerning the possibility of maintaining quality in the changing circumstances. QA is not being seen as an option anymore.

As a process, QA in Distance Education (DE) is not new, as Tait (1993) suggests, peer review of course materials, monitoring of assignments and learner feedback are QA features associated with DE since its inception. DE processes involved inspection of ‘products’ and ‘services’ internally, and by the larger community of stakeholders.

Sallis (1993) reinforces the view shared by DE practitioners that QA is implicit in DE by tracing origins of QA to industrialization which led to a change in the nature of work. According to Sallis ,

‘prior to industrialization, craftsmen set their own standards on which their livelihoods and reputations depended…….,after mass production came, the manufacturing process broke down work into repetitive tasks, taking away from the worker the possibility of self-checking quality...

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...eds time to develop, embed itself and mature in a way to reflect institutional and national priorities.

• Effective ways of engaging and supporting all staff, students and other stakeholders have to be found in the development and implementation of QA, QA cannot be rested on a “culture of compliance”.

• As institutions engaged in facilitating student- centered learning, DE institutions need to address issues of assessing student learning experience in creative and imaginative ways.

The simple institutional narratives create an agenda of issues for discussion for readers interested in QA in DE, this is where the real value of the book is.

Works Cited

Sallis, E.1993.Total Quality Management in Education. London : Kogan Page.

Tait, A 1993, “Systems, Values and Dissent: Quality Assurance for Open and Distance Learning”, Distance Education 14(2), 3033-3014.