The Future of Education

The purpose of this paper is to provide international and USA academic faculty and administrators with a glimpse of some of the success factors that ensure online programs are actually being implemented with quality standards throughout the online learning experiences for students.

Quality in education is not a new paradigm; in the late 1990s quality was characterized by those in higher education as being rife with fads and inappropriate attempts to impose corporate management paradigms on higher education. Birnbaum [2] stated: “Quality management fads may have important latent functions in cuing attention, promoting action, and increasing the variety necessary for organizational evolution”. To close the gap between teaching styles, academic freedom, technology connected with student styles and other pedagogy is the need for best practices in online education. Best practices can help to assure the reliability in the originality of students’ work in today’s information availability exchange.

This paper offers academe a framework of four basic postulates to be utilized in online courses for providing an integrated solution for quality, assessment, reliability, and validity in online education. University administrators, faculty, students, and other stakeholders must find more innovative ways to assure quality ‘likes’ integrity throughout the learning process. Reliability and validity are critical components in any assessment that lends credibility to the inferences drawn [20]. Using active participation through video assignments, video discussions, audio messaging, motivational exercises, cited work in APA/MLA format, and other techniques will help mitigate the problems inherently found in online course instruction. Other topics include organizational changes within institutions for pedagogical consistency in course delivery, quality control checks for reliability in the originality of students’ work, and innovative learning benchmarks to encourage active participation.

Most important are the value attributes of integrity that differentiate colleges and universities from each other in the quality domain. Interwoven in many of these attributes are: inspiring more responsible faculty, motivating students in an online learning environment with technology, accountability in delivery, consistency of quality from course to course, and developing a mental mindset at institutions that align quality, integrity, and assessment to the future of online education.

References

[1] Astin, A.W., Keup, J.R. and Lindholm, J.A. (2002). A decade of changes in undergraduate

education: a national study of system transformation. The Review of Higher Education,

25 (2,):141-62.

[20] Wijekumar, K., Ferguson, L., and Wagoner, D. (2006), “Problems with Assessment Validity and Reliability in Web-Based Distance Learning Environments and Solutions”. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia. 15 (2): 199-215