Quality Standards in Online Teaching and Learning: A Tool for Authors and Developers

Abstract

Higher education institutions have been quick to embrace the power of online technology as a means for improving and enhancing learning within a flexible environment. This growth in online delivery of teaching and learning has been accompanied by increasing interest in strategies for monitoring the quality of online courses within a framework of quality assurance. Formative and summative evaluation processes, whereby academics assess the quality of their materials against agreed standards, have emerged as strategies for addressing such quality concerns. These strategies assume, however, that the academic has access to an agreed set of standards of good practice and has the skill and experience to develop materials that match those standards. This paper outlines an approach which seeks to address quality issues in online teaching and learning by identifying the standards by which online courses are judged, and by providing support for academics to develop their own scholarship of teaching learning in order to make these judgements. The approach involves the development of a review tool comprising a paper-based checklist of agreed good practice, and a supporting website focusing on four areas – instructional design, interface design, use of media and technical aspects. The review tool provides itemised criteria and related standards derived directly from teaching and learning theory, the principles of usability, and guidelines for accessible Web design.