Review of evaluation of quality of distance learning courses: standards, criteria and methods

Abstract

High-quality education is very important for cultural, social, and economic development of society as well as for business and industry, and future development of science. Possibility to learn in convenient time and convenient place has determined the emergence of new form of distance studies and e-courses (distance learning courses, DLC). The diversity of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and their application to e-studies does not cause studies process effectiveness by itself. The quality of distance learning course depends of several factors such as clearly and interestingly presented learning material, well organised learning process, usage of suitable ICTs, relevance of DLC material, students motivation, teachers qualification and professionalism etc. The main aim of this paper is to review, analyse and present e-courses quality evaluation problem and possible methods, standards and principles of identifying quality criteria to solve it. Usually, e-courses quality evaluation is performed by the experts in the relevant area who have special knowledge and skills in particular area. Each educational institution has its own formulated e-courses quality criteria or evaluates e-courses intuitively. In any case, there are common principles and standards for quality criteria. There is also experience of quality evaluation of e-courses applying different Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods, using experts’ identified values according to provided quality criteria as well as the weights (i.e. importance) of those DLC quality criteria.