Quality Control

The Sloan Consortium, an institutional and professional leadership organization dedicated to integrating online education into the mainstream of higher education, has created an elaborated Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) framework. The five pillars of the Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI)  framework are (Moore,    Maintaining Quality in Online Education, 2007):
 * Learning  effectiveness,
 * Institutional  commitment and cost effectiveness,
 * Access,
 * Faculty  satisfaction,
 * Student  satisfaction

A detailed description of the Sloan Consortium Quality   Framework and tools they use to evaluate each of the Five Pillars is   available at (Moore, The Sloan Consortium Quality Framework And    The Five Pillars, 2005):.

E-moderators – the key quality factor. Research shows that the most critical success factors of online courses are “skills, effort and guidance of the subject experts who moderate each course.” Therefore, selecting, training, benchmarking, and supporting good e-moderators (online tutors/mentors) should be one of the top priorities (Short et al., 2007).