Quality guidelines for online courses: The development of an instrument to audit online units

Abstract

Institutional, national and global pressures demand that universities address issues of quality in teaching and learning. The maintenance of existing courses and the imperative to offer new courses online necessitates the development of measures and guidelines that can inform instructional designers and academics. A number of quality guidelines have been produced that reflect different contexts and purposes. Some focus on school learning, some on pedagogy alone and some that reflect the designs of particular courseware management software. This paper sets out to describe a workable set of guidelines for academic and support staff in the development and benchmarking of online course quality across the institution that emphasised current approaches to teaching and learning in higher education supported by appropriate content and delivery strategies.