Toward a quality assurance approach to e-learning courses.

Finding ways to assure the quality of e-learning is an important endeavor. This article identifies eight quality assurance strategies in use at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. The eight strategies are reviews of instructional design, web development, editing, usability and accessibility, maintainability, copyright, infrastructure impact, and content and rigor. The impact of each of these strategies is discussed as well as how the strategy has evolved during implementation and operation. The university's e-learning courses have achieved some measure of merit for quality within both their local audience as well as nationally and internationally. Much of this is due to the application of the quality assurance strategies shared in this article.

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Like the proverb about beauty, quality in education appears to be in the eye of the beholder. While quality always has been important to education, it has remained an elusive concept. In 1998, Bannan-Ritland, Harvey, and Milheim (p. 78) wrote that, in education, "there is obviously no widely accepted measure of quality." Several organizations, such as the American Council on Education (1996), the Institute for Higher Education Policy (2000), the American Federation of Teachers (2000), and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (2002), have distributed documents of quality standards for e-learning. These attempts at defining quality e-learning illustrate both the importance of quality standards and the lack of a definitive quality assurance process which can be endorsed by all. Online course quality remains in much discussion.

WHAT IS A QUALITY COURSE?

When the University of Houston-Clear Lake (UHCL) embarked into e-learning, the administration was determined to establish a process to assure the production of quality online courses. They gathered stakeholders, including learners, faculty, administrators, representatives from industries that employ graduates, and the university community. In trying to define quality online courses, establish course standards, and develop a set of quality assurance strategies, the stakeholder committee discovered that perspectives widely differed in defining course quality, as shown in Table 1.

While a simple definition of a quality online course remained elusive, the stakeholders committee found common agreement around the idea that a quality online course would be the direct result of a course creation process that included quality assurance strategies.

THE UHCL COURSE PRODUCTION PROCESS