 I'm an open learning consultant from Australia and here in the studio with us tonight we have Professor Insang Chong who's a colleague of mine and we have recently been involved in researching and writing and editing a book on quality assurance in open and distance and e-learning and we thought it would be interesting just to talk about our impressions from writing the book on what is happening and what needs to to happen okay and so maybe I could just kick off with the first question I mean from your point of view why do you feel it's so important that we have quality assurance in open and distance and e-learning why is why is it necessary as you probably know there are so many students these days and so many distance education providers institutions they offer distance education programs for example in Asia only there are more than five million students who receive distance education but because of the increase of number of students we need to pay more attention to the quality issues otherwise those students will maybe in some some cases won't get the quality education so that's why we need to pay more attention to quality assurance and that's why many countries these days are beginning to talk about or discuss about the quality assurance framework policy yes I mean I mean you and I obviously have had many many years involved with open and distance learning we we're great enthusiasts for open and distance learning but we have to be honest we know that not all governments not all members of the community not all employers think that these new forms of teaching and learning are necessarily as good as the more conventional ones so and you know we know that in in some countries in fact now as we've heard they're actually withdrawing support for the idea of open and distance learning so it's obviously very important that we make sure uh that at least it measures up to the quality of conventional education I I believe we should go further than that I think we should actually you think so yes I think we should actually we should have a very strong quality assurance framework I think one of the problems of quality assurance it tends to be concerned with making sure you meet minimal standards and I think we should be trying to show that open and distance learning is better than conventional and there are some other cases as well even now well you know about university I was just going to say university does to the booker we'd like to tell us something about the way they went about quality assurance yeah University of Tabuka they have developed this extensive quality assurance manual which lists all the detailed job descriptions of each position of their staff staff members and then they also relate the the staff's performance to the quality assurance manner so so so it's performance based quality assurance it's not just the you know list all the quality assurance standards but they they are very closely related to staff performance and then learning outcomes yes so they have done that and they also received external invited external review I think they've had ISO accreditation and then IDRC, ICD and then um what else uh they're their own countries funds from yeah but but it was interesting that this actually started as I understand it as an internal process in other words they didn't start on quality assurance in order to meet the government's expectations they did it to improve their quality and continuously improve their quality and then said to the government would you like to come and check on yeah and you know external before you invite external reviewers you do contribute you do focus on internal improvement first and then you invite external reviewers because it's important that you develop a culture within your institution to improve the quality yeah and I think that's the key I guess I think that that that that business are trying to inculcate a culture of continual improvement and the phrase that I sometimes use is reflective practice too so you're not only teaching or being an instructional designer or putting an IT system in place but you're saying how can I continually uh improve improve this and I think going back to the UT thing the university is too booker the other thing that impresses me is I think all too often there's a danger that quality assurance can be rhetoric you know high claims and so on but it's very interesting the process of actually drilling down and I've had a chance to to see a bit of this at universities too booker and then you find when you get to their degree program I think it's a degree program for teachers yes you find that all the measures that apply the institutional level still apply equally well in that course or program and I think that's very impressive yeah and it it was actually as you said top-down approach you know the leader initiate this quality assurance activity within the tabuka within the institution but then it went to down down to the personnel I mean they're all the stem members and they together develop details the manual detailed job descriptions whether you should go for a centralized approach for quality assurance in an institution or whether you should try to get the culture to permeate to be embedded right in across the university are you in favor of one model or the other I think at the beginning that you need to have some kind of a unit or a team which oversees whole process otherwise you can the responsibilities are not clear so in any case of I mean we are talking about university tabuka but in case of other universities that have been very successful in quality assurance activities they usually have a centralized unit and then at the same time they you know share their responsibilities with others but I think at the beginning especially we need a central and that's interesting I mean I'm not going to name the country but there's one country in Asia that I I know I think particularly well and they've recently introduced a quality assurance system and what worries me is it seems to be that the the the body responsible for quality assurance has said we want a quality assurance committee to be set up in every university but what I don't see there is any sort of follow-through in terms of in-service training or enabling people to understand really what their role and status and responsibilities are maybe that's not the institution itself they want to establish the quality assurance mechanism it's from outside yeah right yeah in that case I think it's a little different yeah maybe we need actually both we have to have some kind of I think for me a centralized system with this commitment from the members or leadership support yeah really important the other thing that you and I have discussed in the book and the contributors to the book too is this question about whether one should have the same quality assurance framework and system for conventional education or whether in fact open and distance learning a particularly e-learning call for some different approaches how do you feel about that I think the general framework should be same should be the same but the specifics there are unique points that e-learning or distance education represents so in that case to address the uniqueness of the distance education e-learning I think we need a more a little different maybe majors to assure the quality but we are with things like web 2 I mean we are actually introducing some new concepts are we like constructivist and connectivist learning and collaborative learning and so John Daniel was talking this morning about moving to a situation where the student started to develop his or her own own curriculum so I would have thought that that might call for different measures different yeah I think in that case we need some different majors and a more specific you know that's that's to address the uniqueness of e-learning or technology but why do we address those issues it's under like in order to facilitate learning collaborative learning that could apply to both distance education and conventional learning as well so what I'm saying is to we we adopt the same structure same questions but the more detailed ones could be different I think the other issue that comes up is that some people resist or resent the idea of quality assurance because they say this is further example of the corporatization about universities and it leads to a lot of paperwork and a lot of bureaucracy and so on so how do we how do we respond to that how do we try to win hearts and minds and get quality assurance mainstreamed into the system I guess when you look at quality assurance as a control or management it's kind of very difficult for you know providers to accept the quality control framework right but when you look at this as a your own self-improvement this is a tool that I like to improve myself then you can more easily adopt or you can even initiate quality assurance activities within your society I mean with the institution and go beyond that and inviting quality external quality assurance teams to to oversee your assessors so I guess it's a matter of it's not it's not that you want to do it you have to do it or I guess it's both there is a needs that you have to show that you are providing a quality program right at the same time you in order to survive or develop yourself you have to improve your quality having the the systems in place to recognize when things go wrong or help to put them right you know so that's that's I think a very important factor all right well uh nice talking with you again and I know this conversation will will go on and I'm sure that the quality assurance agenda will keep on uh you know changing and tonight we've only talked about higher education but there's also quality assurance and open schooling and non-formal education and so on so there's a lot more work for us and for other people to do thank you very much thank you