QUALITY ASSESSMENT AND ASSURANCE IN E-LEARNING: BEST PRACTICE CONTRIBUTIONS

E-learning has become an increasingly important learning option in higher educational institutions and there is a lot of work written on the advantages and benefits of e-learning. However, there is no general framework for quality management, quality assurance, or quality assessment in this field. Many practitioners are seeking for guidelines that can be applied to the assessment of online environments and courses. The aim of our work is to develop a quality assurance model for e-learning courses and apply it into our institution. This model will allow the implementation of a monitoring system with an associated feedback loop. In order to develop this quality assurance model, we are currently evaluating best practices contributions in our institution e-learning courses and constructing a framework of quality assurance criteria. In this paper we describe selected methods of quality assessment and assurance and discuss how well they meet the criteria for successful quality assurance efforts defined. Preliminary results and a first scratch of our model are presented.