Strengthening the Internal Quality Assurance Mechanisms in Open and Distance Learning Systems

introduction

The term quality is a difficult concept to define. The concept is easily misconstrued because of its rather nebulous characteristics. While many people have a fair idea as to what they construe the quality of a phenomenon or an object to be, they find it difficult to define the term. Dictionaries define quality as degree of excellence. This suggests that quality is not some kind of fixed, immutable target or destination that may be attained merely by striving sufficiently hard, but a dynamic or moving target whose attainment at each point in time is facilitated by a set of strategies that are themselves also dynamic(Ekhaguere, 2006).

In industrial organizations, where the assembly line production format is popular, control measures are used by managers to ascertain and sustain the credibility and standard of the product being released into the market. According to Duncan (1978) there are two types of control measures for goal attainment -feedback control and preventive control. While the feedback control is based on the information from the end-users of a product regarding the performance of the product, after they must have obtained and made use of it; preventive control relies on preventive planning to minimize variance or deviation in the production process. Quality assurance is a component of the preventive control mechanisms which involves ensuring that all intermediate products in production process conform as much as possible to specifications. It is believed that the lack of variance in intermediate products guarantees final product quality, all things being equal.

In the past, quality issues were not among the major concerns of educational institutions, because the excellence of formal training and knowledge was taken for granted. At that time, educational institutions focused more on ensuring that their offerings are of certain universally predetermined standards. These standards, formally referred to as Academic Standards are normally identified by features such as the depth of content and duration of a course of study; the transactional treatment received by learners at a given period of time, which is defined by classroom teaching, tutorials and the practical sessions that learners are exposed in the course of their training; and a standard norm of evaluating learning achievements, through assignments and end-of-term examinations. These standards had characterized educational systems for centuries and it is regarded as a common denominator of all that is necessary in all educational institutions.

However, as the global environments enlarged and educational institutions expanded in size and numbers, there arose the need for benchmarking the value of the instructional content given to (clients) or seekers of knowledge. Thus, different quality assurance agencies were put in place in many countries of the world to ascertain the credibility of educational programmes on offer in all institutions of learning – conventional, distance including online. Many of these external quality assurance mechanisms have been somewhat effective in setting bench marks and minimum academic standards below which all relevant institutions are not expected to fall. The implementation of quality assurance procedures in educational organizations according to Broadfoot (1994) inAfemikhe (2004), involves defining appropriate criteria, accreditation of institutions, visits of verifiers and use of assessment panels. Moderation of examination questions and scripts also forms part of the quality assurance process as it seeks to reduce sources of errors. Harlem (1994) identified two levels of moderation and these are: adjusting assessment outcomes to improve fairness, and putting in place processes of arriving at fair assessment. These factors point out the roles which are played by the external quality assurance and accreditation agencies within national and international boundaries. According to Barney Pityana, Vice Chancellor of UNISA, external quality assurance begins with accreditation as a service provider for distance higher education programmes which government through possibly a Higher Education Commission or another independence system or mechanism. However Daniels (2006) observed that no quality assurance system should be transplanted from one institution to another across organizational, social and cultural boundaries. The development must be home grown from its context.

The evolution of open and distance learning systems which are generally designed to provide equitable access to high quality education for all who have been denied access by the rigid operations of the conventional systems of education, has led to a greater degree of emphasis on systemic credibility on the entire education system. This underscores the importance of quality in open and distance learning in all ramifications. The general acceptance and adoption of the open and distance system has been largely influenced by increased enrolment rates, which is a result of population explosion; the changing social characteristics of learners, which created the imperative for continuing lifelong education; as well as, the convergence of information and communication technologies in education and training. However, quality issues by whatever connotation: quality control, quality management, total quality management, quality assurance or culture of quality has become paramount in open and distance learning globally. This is informed on one hand, by the extant perception of distance education as a second rate or second best educational approach (Valentine, 2002). On the other hand, all [educational] institutions have the responsibility to ensure that a high quality service is being offered to its [clients] learners. A third rationale for the emphasis on quality issues in open and distance learning is the industrial character of the system. As with all industrial systems, mechanisms are always instituted for sustaining the credibility and standard of the products issued to the customers. Thus, in order to establish a ‘parity of esteem’ with the face-to-face educational system, and to indicate its greater efficiency, distance education practitioners have the obligation of justifying the ambitious claim that all fields of knowledge and all levels of education can be taught effectively via the distance learning system.

Though, the conventional education system also faces the challenge of quality assurance, this challenge is accentuated in distance education, because of its wider jurisdiction, heterogeneous student profile and the fact that there are limited face-to-face contact between instructors and learners. The challenge to establish the relevance and efficiency of the certificates and degrees earned through the open learning system therefore remains pervasive throughout the lifespan of the institution and/or the recipients of the awards.

quality assurance in open and distance education

Open learning and distance education tends to have a wider public presence, because its resources are available for all to access and assess, therefore it faces the demand for greater social accountability than the conventional system. Within the framework of their stated aims and objectives ODL institutions have had to confront the all important issue of quality assurance in all aspects of its educational programmes. However, programme implementation may not meet its catalogued description and this may lead to the failure of the programmes to achieve the goals for which they were designed, no matter how laudable it is. Since goal attainment is paramount to any organization, the internal quality assurance mechanisms put in place would be a way of ensuring goal attainment. As stated earlier distance education faces a stigma of inferiority, therefore quality should be a self-serving imperative for distance education institutions. Open and distance learning institutions have to assure the integrity of their qualifications in order to gain the confidence of policy makers, employers of labour as well as prospective learners. This is only possible ifthe institutions are able to deploy very effective and sustainable internal quality assurance mechanisms for establishing the excellence of its services and products.

Quality assurance conceptualized in this paper involves everybody. Its attainment is consequent upon the community of students, teachers, support staff and managers with each contributing to and striving for continued improvement. Quality Assurance practices are designed to ensure that products and services are of appropriate quality. Though, it has been indicated that elements of quality assurance is noticeable in distance learning programmes, there is still a lot to be done, because the extant quality assurance processes are still dominated by external quality control and accrediting agencies. This leads to an over-reliance on external quality criteria for defining the value of the offerings being made to the customers (learners) of the institution. As the improvement of the quality of goods and services is the goal of industrial and corporate organizations, it must also be the goal of open and distance learning institutions to continuously improve on the quality of instruction, research and community service. Therefore internal quality assurance mechanisms defined by the total quality management approach, which involves the integration of all functions and processes within an organization in order to achieve continuous improvement must come to the forefront in the planning and administration of open and distance learning institutions. The implications of this is that the inputs, processes and outputs must all be well coordinated, and subjected to quality performance measures, to ensure that the overall goals and objectives of the institution are achieved.

Internal Quality Assurance mechanisms in open and distance Learning

The foregoing has serious implications for quality assurance processes in open and distance learning institutions, because they are not expected to pursue knowledge for its own sake, rather their mandate is to provide qualified manpower and produce functional knowledge useful and applicable in all facets of life in the 21st century corporate environment. Recruitment and selection of both academic and support staff must be based on sound criteria, not limited to mere certification which indicates that the holders have satisfied a prescribed set of requirements, which qualifies them to occupy the designated positions, rather it must also establish the practical competence of the individual against a predetermined benchmark that is institution and/or position-specific. It must be noted that the process of quality assurance in open and distance learning commences with the academics who should not only be qualified, but must also have passion for and commitment to distance education as a mode of learning, empathy with learners and skills to participate in a learning mode that demands just as much in terms of creativity and professional expertise from the academic as it does from the student.

The design and development of curriculum and instructional design must be based on pretest criteria, rather than on externally imposed standards of development. The quality of educational transactions should be reflected in product, processes and the outcomes (levels of learners’ achievement, competence and satisfaction, employability of graduates vis-a-vis the perceptions of employers and the long-term socio-educational impact) of the system. Therefore the instructional materials issued to the learners must not only reflect the most up-to-date knowledge available, but should also take into consideration the changing social context of knowledge in the current milieu. Additionally, learning materials must truly cater to the requirements of different learning styles and not just cater to the needs of broad classifications of popular learning styles. Thus, in developing distance learning materials (print, electronic or on-line), care must be taken to ensure that different groups are able to access these resources in the format in which it will be most useful to them. A system of developmental testing, to ascertain the effectiveness of the course materials, is proposed before they are issued to the wider population of its learners.

The challenge of quality assurance for distance learning institutions also requires that the learning transaction that takes place is sufficient to establish a mastery of the subject matter by the learners. Interactivity is the crux of transactional treatment received by learners in the course of their learning experiences, thus the materials and the processes must be structured to provide the learners with the preferred level of interaction in the learning process. While the issues of tutorial facilitation in many ODL institutions seem to be optional, counselling services should not be regarded as optional. Learners should be prompted to seek counselling at various stages of their learning. This may be done by sending e-mails, post cards at specified phases of the course to encourage and motivate the learners to study hard and persevere in his/her studies; this would also serve to remind the students that while s/he is studying alone, s/he is not alone. Though, there is a little or no emphasis on entry behaviour in Open Learning and Distance Education, there is a great deal of emphasis on the exit behaviour of learners, but the in-course behaviour of the learners is rarely ever taken into consideration. Apart from the formative evaluation which seems to focus only on the cognitive achievements of the learners, there is no consideration given to the social or psychological experiences of distance learners. Counselling activities in open and distance learning must go beyond the traditional approach which waits for the learners to initiate the interaction, rather it must become pro-active and literally ‘intervene’ in the learning processes of the learners to ensure that they are benefiting optimally from their studies.

Additionally, criteria to assess the quality of work and of teams which carry out research in ODL institutions must differ from those of the traditional institutions which focus essentially on disciplinary science. A voluntary system of peer review as it obtains in the traditional institutions may be adopted, however, emphasis must not be solely on peer review, carried out by those adjudged to have contributed in terms of published research to the discipline, but must also focus on the context of application, which should incorporate a diverse range of intellectual interests as well as other social, economic and political ones. This would inevitably lead to an academic fraternity, in which the actors in the ODL academia would move out of a traditional garb and develop multiple competencies which would enable them to accept multiple responsibilities after having undergone training and retraining as new technologies evolve to aid academic interactions between learners and their instructors.

The ascendancy of information and communications technology in education and training has created greater potentials for reaching wider audiences at much faster speed than before. On the downside, this creates the possibilities of spreading half-baked and incomplete knowledge or instructional content. El-Khawas (1998) stated that the use of technology has expanded access and spawned new ways of teching and learning that were only imagined…but it has also brought with it new challenges and concerns for quality control. Thus, ‘the fallacy of the printed word’, which indicates the tendency for readers to accept everything that is provided in a printed literature may extend to materials that are sourced either on-line synchronously, or are accessed asynchronously through devices like CD-ROMs, listservs etc. Therefore, the quality of instructional activities that are ICT enabled must also be subject to quality assurance. The materials must meet certain prescribed criteria, such as the following examples identified in the Consumer Based Quality Guidelines for Learning Technologies and Distance Education which may serve as a useful guide for policy makers and providers of technology-assisted learning on the essential components of a quality course or programme (Hope 1999):

• Clearly defined and achievable learning objectives

• Relevant, scholarly and up-to-date curriculum content

• Well-designed teaching and learning materials

• Well-supported total learning package

• Appropriate use of learning technologies

• Sound technical design

• Appropriate and necessary personnel support

• Provision of additional learning resources

• Planned resource provision

• Outline review and evaluation cycle

Further, the characteristics of software as intangible products are more consistent with higher education. The quality criteria applied for software in engineering adapted for higher education systems by Owlia & Aspinwall (1996) in Table 1 is applicable to ODL systems when selecting software to be used in their processes.

Lastly, assessment and evaluation of learning achievement at various stages of the learning process must be regarded as an important hub of internal quality assurance measures in open and distance learning. Basically, learner evaluation in open and distance learning involves the self-assessment exercises for introspective evaluation, continuous assessment which is known as the ‘Tutor-Marked Assignments’ (TMAs), as well as Term-end-examinations. The self examination or self-check questions and the tutor marked assessments are samples of formative evaluation, expected to record the progress of the learners in the course of studying the materials, while the term-end-examination is a sum-mative system of evaluation at the end of the course, used to determine overall learning achievement of the learners. The integrity of open and distance learning can be directly linked to the integrity of learning evaluation. A myriad of challenges exists in evaluating distance learners because of the vastly heterogeneous population. Therefore open and distance learning institutions must place emphasis on the quality of assessment process including issues like moderation of examination questions to establish the horizontal and vertical standards of the items; maintenance of a standard question bank to draw questions from as and when needed, as well as operational security concerns. Recent developments in assessment have led to the introduction of the on-demand examination system whereby learners can apply for and sit for their examinations at anytime within the semester. This makes administration ofthe examination process convenient for the institution, since it would only have to cater for limited clusters of learners at a time. However, the integrity of assessment processes and learner evaluation must not be compromised in the bid to enhance administrative convenience. Conventional institutions over time have perfected formalized procedures for enhancing the integrity of their examinations, distance learning institutions must also take all necessary steps to ensure that their examinations meets up to acceptable standards of quality.

Table 1. Software quality dimensions in higher education

conclusion

For any course or programme, irrespective of the mode of delivery, an institution must be able to demonstrate that: Learning outcomes have been set at the appropriate level and clearly communicated to the learners; Content and design of the curriculum and instructional methods employed are effective in enabling the learners to achieve the outcomes in terms of both the acquisition of knowledge and the development of the related practical skills and abilities; and Assessment is appropriately designed and rigorously administered to measure the achievement of the outcomes. In open and distance learning system, these standards are taken steps further because the massification of access has created a rather suspicious view of the system and its advocates, even among academic cycles. Consequently, internal quality assurance mechanisms must be entrenched into all activities that take place within the system such that it translates from a system of quality maintenance into a system characterized by the culture of quality. Thus, activities of ODL institutions such as staff recruitment and selection, curriculum design, course preparation, design and development of self-learning materials, information and knowledge management systems, assignments handling and turnaround-time, course delivery to learners, counselling support, copy right and intellectual property, finance and budgeting, project implementation etc, must all be brought within the purview of a systemic internal quality assurance mechanism which is institution specific, i.e. homegrown, such that the hybrid product that evolves from such an institution will be regarded as the mark of quality and excellence of the open and distance learning system. Distance learning institutions must be willing to formulate and operationalize their own individual notions of quality, they must also be ready to mobilize and sensitize their various constituencies on the imperative of quality management by formulating strategic plans for quality management that will serve as a road map for building a culture of quality in all aspects of institutional functions and activities.

key terms

Curriculum: The total structure of knowledge and skills and educational experiences that make up any one educational system or its component parts.

Developmental Testing: Trying out materials with learners in the hope of developing or improving those materials for the benefit of other or future learners.

Formative Evaluation: The assessment of learning that occurs as a project or course is in progress, with the aim of identifying problems and addressing them, immediately.

Interactivity: The ability for the learner to respond in some way to the learning materials and obtain feedback on the response; there are two kinds of interactivity: (1) learning materials interactivity, involving the learners’ interaction with the medium, the level and immediacy of feedback the medium itself provides, and the extent to which the medium will accommodate learners’ own input and direction; (2) social interactivity, the extent to which learners interact with teachers and with each other via a given medium.

Open and Distance Learning: A way of providing learning opportunities that is characterized by the separation of teacher and learner in time and place, or both time and place; learning that is certified in some way by an institution or agency ; the use of a variety of media, including print and electronic; two-way communications that allow learners and tutors to interact; the possibility of occasional face-to-face meetings; and a specialized division of labour in the production and delivery of courses.

Quality: The fitness for purpose of a product or service according to a set of required standards.

Quality Assurance: An approach to organizing work that: ensures the institution’s mission and aims are clear and known to all; ensures the systems through which work will be done are well thought out, foolproof and communicated to everyone; ensures everyone’s responsibilities are clear and understood; defines and documents the institution’s sense of ‘quality’; sets in place systems to check that everything is working to plan; and when things go wrong – and they will- there are agreed ways of putting them right.

Standards: The parts of a learning objective that describe how well the learner will be expected to perform, expressed in terms of accuracy, speed or quality.

Summative Evaluation: Assessment that occurs at the completion of a course or project, which provides a summary account of its effectiveness and the extent to which it met its goals and objectives.

Task Analysis: The process that identifies the skills and knowledge a competent person needs to complete a task to ensure that they are included in the learning process.