Publish at April 10 2015 Updated January 28 2026
Designed by the Commonwealth of Learning, the "Quality Assurance Toolkit for Distance Higher Education Institutions and Programmes" (.pdf) covers just about every assessable area surrounding online higher education.
Comprising 223 standards criteria and 662 performance indicators for assessing the extent to which the criteria have been met, they are grouped into two main categories: those relating to institutions and those relating to teaching programs.
They include elements of trust, accessibility, innovation, economic efficiency, faculty satisfaction, student satisfaction, pedagogical effectiveness, continuous improvement, excellence and leadership.
For institutions
Standard criteria for institutions include
Teaching programs
More specifically, programs cover
The quality of this document lies in the fact that for each standard, an observable performance criterion is defined.
For example, for an element such as institutional policy, we ask whether a policy document exists, whether it has been communicated, whether it has been discussed, whether it can be consulted by interested parties, and so on.
Is it applied? Are evaluations carried out systematically? Are results communicated? Are the results viewed positively? Do they lead to a rapid improvement of the program?
In short, if an institution intends to adopt a real quality policy, this reference framework is a very good starting point.
Download the "Quality Assurance Toolkit for Distance Higher Education Institutions and Programmes" - Commonwealth of Learning - Unesco - .pdf - 355 pages.
https://oasis.col.org/entities/publication/6350e0c0-c62a-465f-8d71-dbf06c2545e5
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