Quality Assurance in Online Education: A Development Process to Design High-Quality Courses

摘要

The number of courses and full degrees offered online, raises a considerable interest in concerns and problems associated with online education, particularly as it relates to the quality of online instruction. Quality Assurance (QA) has become a very important issue for both, educational institutions and institutional accrediting agencies. This is a progressive process and institutions go through different stages until they implement QA effectively in their institution. This paper will start by presenting different QA approaches using different rubrics; then it will describe the three different stages that the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) had experienced in this path to design high-quality courses: (a) training, (b) process, and (c) formalizing the process. In the last step, a very detail process for designing online courses will be presented. In the next section, the types of QA reviews that are done at CCBC will be depicted. Finally, the paper will end with some topics that the Online Learning office is working in this continuing process of designing and implementing high-quality courses.