Abstract:

This work intended to draw a comparison between the National Distance Education University of Spain, The Open University of Great Britain, The Athabasca University of Canada and the Coordination of Open University, Innovative Education and Distance Education of Mexico.

A questionnaire has been designed and applied in order to do this comparison.

Distance education has a worldwide tradition dating back to the 1960s. Mexico has also participated in this modality in public and private universities. In this work, an evaluation instrument is proposed, and its aim was to identify theoretical and methodological developments, as well as practices in distance education in the universities mentioned earlier. 5 Dimensions were proposed to evaluate which strategies and tools have been applied and what works better in the most relevant areas in distance education, such as:
1) theories,
2) instructional design,
3) interactivity,
4) technologies, and
5) learning outcomes.

Various quantitative measures are proposed and as a result, and a structural equation model would be applied to identify the variables that explain the learning outcomes.

Mexican experts were invited as judges in order to validate contents of the questions. An initial questionnaire of 87 questions was reduced to 67 and the questionnaire was applied to functionaries, professors and students of the aforementioned institutions.

Among the results, we had that theories were different among the universities included in the assessment, that instructional design models differences were non significant, that interactivity is seen as the shape, the function and the impact of the educational dialogue in learning, that technologies were seen as aids in the process of learning and that learning outcomes were learning as is expected in the programs. In general terms, the outcomes of this experiment were: that there were non-significant differences between the universities assessed.

The model of structural equations indicated that in all the universities the learning outcomes owed to theories, instructional design models, as well as the interactivity and the technologies employed. So, we conclude that universities that offer distance learning plans have non-significant differences.

Keywords:

Comparative online learning, Online Learning, e-Learning, Comparative Education, Evaluation instrument.