Origins, Part III: Demonstrating Quality in Distance Learning

This post originally appeared in my short-lived blog Truth and Beauty, and was moved to this blog in June, 2007.

Part of what's been going on in my professional life that has led me to this interest in and exploration of Institutional Research and Effectiveness has been an increasing pressure (to some extent self-imposed) to demonstrate quality and effectiveness of distance learning initiatives. Since online teaching and learning is still so new, there seems to be quite a lot of scrutiny. Questions about whether online courses are effective as traditional classroom learning abound.

As a manager of distance learning initiatives, I've struggled to find ways to demonstrate the quality and effectiveness of these programs. I know they're high quality, and I know that the faculty and students involved in them generally find them even more effective than their traditional courses. But how to demonstrate this to the skeptics?

It seems that one direction this has led folks in the field is toward creating frameworks for quality measurement in distance learning. It's interesting to me that rather than doing extensive studies and data gathering about teaching and learning outcomes we've instead decided to create models that help us evaluate the quality of the inputs to distance learning courses. But then, it seems that the history of assessment in higher education is about this balance between evaluating inputs and looking at the outcomes.

More on this in Origins: Part IV.