Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

9 – Quality Assurance by Design
According to the International Standard Organization
ISO/IEC 19796-1, QA can be ensured by:
• identifying the main quality objective for a process;
• identifying the responsible actors;
• identifying methods or instruments that can be used
to assure quality; and
• designing to measure the success of the quality objective.
For example, if an organization provides short-term
programming courses for groups of 20 students learning
C++ in two weeks, the online teaching and learning style
is quite different than it would be if the objective were to
learn Greek. The system needs to meet the learner’s objectives.
Another example is proposed by Parker, as four
QA principles (2003):
• guaranteeing consistency in the product’s results
based on long-term values;
• guaranteeing consistency in governmental and corporate
education;
• guaranteeing learner-centred education;
• guaranteeing collaboration between internal and external
stakeholders).
Parker believes that in order to maintain continuity and
consistency it is important to define values. As mentioned
earlier, collaboration between the stakeholders
for a learner-centred education is the key to success.
Institutions need to have a proper understanding of their
monitoring operations if they are to improve decisionmaking
and performance. This being done, they will
satisfy both themselves and external agencies that they
are effective in achieving aims and objectives, as well as
being cost-effective and cost-efficient (Rumble, 1986).
To sum up, specific frameworks are necessary to
specify quality factors and requirements fit for purpose.
Collaboration between all stakeholders is critical: involvement
of all stakeholders in the process of design is
important: good evaluation tools and techniques ensure
quality. E-learning is valuable as an added learning environment
to enhance human capabilities further.
Design to enable human
capabilities
For the past 50 years, two main trends have been observed
in general education: (a) the socio-cultural focus;
and (b) the integration of technology in educational
practice. However, still in its infancy, e-learning has yet
to construct models of design to reach socio-cultural
learning targets. There is as yet to employ consideration
of the learner and user (Wallace, 1999; Smulders, 2002).
Poor interfaces do not support e-learners efficiently and
effectively, even though the existing commercial and
open source learning management systems (LMS) provide
several applications and tools. Most learning management
systems are based on a constructivist model,
and not on an e-learning community and reflective
model of supporting distance education (Rumble, 2001).
There are, therefore, no multiple perspectives of
e-learning’s theoretical framework. Evaluators are still
not supported by coherent, interdisciplinary evaluation
frameworks and tools. This results in inadequate understanding
and lack of descriptions of quality factors. To
Silius and Tervakari (2003), one evaluator, whether s/he
is a teacher or a systems’ designer or a quality planner,
can hardly be an expert in all aspects. Collaboration
between the stakeholders is the first step towards the
adoption of a more social model for e-learning.
THE SOCIAL DIMENSION OF LEARNING IN DESIGN
Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL):
The social aspects of learning with the aid of computer
networks first appeared in CSCL. This followed the
computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) that
utilised ethnography (Garfinkel, 1967) in systems design.
Ethnography provides descriptions of qualitative
and quantitative data about human social phenomena
based on fieldwork, and was used to search for descriptions
that could provide abstract specifications for systems
design, i.e., finding ways to communicate to the
designers what users want. Thus, the research of Hughes
and colleagues was based on socio-technical design
(STD) (Mumford, 1983; Fan, 2006) to inform the designers
of system requirements. The STD mission was to
assist system designers to maximize human gains while
achieving business and technical excellence (Mumford,
1983). It recognises the interaction of technology and
people, and produces work systems that are both technically
efficient and have social characteristics. CSCL is
linked to STD via CSCW (Hughes et al., 1997) and is
anchored in the notion that, the system cannot be accurately
understood as each property depends on the other.
Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL)
was based on theories that emphasized the social dimension
of learning, such as distributed cognition (Hutchins,
1995; Salomon, 1993); activity theory (Engestrom,
1987; Kuutti, 1996); situated learning (Resnick, Levine &
Teasley, 1991); Greeno, Smith & Moore, 1993); collaborative
learning (Crook, 1994); and legitimate peripheral
participation in communities of practice (Lave & Wen-
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