Quality Assurance for Online Programs

The need for determining and maintaining quality in the process of designing, developing and delivering online courses is becoming an important issue for universities and institutions worldwide. Teaching online may be a different process to conventional teaching, involving possible changes to pedagogy and teaching practice such as learner-centered education and collaborative learning. Accordingly, quality assurance appropriately reflecting characteristics of online learning would have to be considered. Therefore we reviewed the existing quality standards in this article. As a result we find that while there is some consensus among the guidelines on quality, there seems to be no united standards. Thus, there is a need to develop a comprehensive unified set of quality standards that would be applicable to online learning programs.