Introduction
Over the past few years, there has been increasing interest in the quality of distance education, especially with regard to the questions of what and how, i.e., what is quality in distance education and how can we measure and manage it?
How is quality to be defined and assessed? As Robinson (1992) points out, judgements about quality differ according to whose views are being sought. Consequently, the fundamental question in the context of quality is 'quality for whom and in whose interests?' (Nunan and Calvert, 1991). A traditional conclusion seems to be that quality means different things to
different interest groups. Any distance education system incorporates many different elements and processes and the actual degree of importance given to these varying components depends upon which interest group is going to interpret quality.
In reality "quality" means different things to different observers and interest groups; not all share the same perceptions of priorities for change (OECD, 1989).
Exoteric Influences
Stewart-Smith (1994) argues that quality has become an issue for different groups, a highly political matter. The main groups concerned with the quality in distance education are governments (government departments or agencies), professional bodies, employers, the managers of distance education institutes, teachers (academics, tutors) and students.
Government
Government has a dual role. On the one hand, government may determine a specific basis for distance education quality through legislation, as it has done for example in Germany. On the other hand, government, as Stewart-Smith ( 1994) states, is responsible for the provision of education and needs to be assured that it receives value and quality for money. Furthermore, if government departments are going to buy educational products, they will assess the quality of the product in terms of profitability.
Employers
For an employer, as a buyer of a distance education product or as a sponsor of an individual student, a distance education programme is an investment in training. Thus, the higher the quality of the programme, the more the organisation profits from its investment.
Professional bodies
Professional bodies and associations aim at the maintenance of acceptable professional standards and may also be concerned, at least indirectly, with the quality of distance education through accreditation systems and by a code of ethics or good business practice.
Quality controllers
International standards (ISO 9000-04) have created a new approach to quality in distance education. In the ISO system external controllers examine and interpret the quality of a distance education system (an institute) by means of documentation and guidelines.
All the interest groups described so far belong to the 'exoteric' (outside) influences (Jakupec, 1991). Their perceptions of quality are especially important when a need exists for an overall framework for taking actions and constructing a set of quality Guidelines for distance education that can be customised. However, because educational institutes are operating in different training markets and under different conditions, it is clear that the 'optimal quality' for a certain institute will be determined more according to esoteric (inside) influences derived from the practitioners of distance education. Esoteric influencers have access to 'field' information which creates a basis for an in-depth, comprehensive and tailor-made evaluation of quality for their institute.
Esoteric Influences
Management
In the management's view, quality represents a very important asset. The management (directors, president, a management group) traditionally measures the quality of training by study completion rates, overall grades, profitability or similar performance indicators.
At the moment quality is one of the basic objectives in a distance education institute's strategy.
Quality helps to establish a good reputation and image for the correspondence school and thus attracts more students to enrol on courses. Quality is one of the key aspects of business competitiveness... it helps to ensure the completion rates of studies and diminishes dropout figures and results in satisfied students who may in the future be willing to start new studies (AECS Quality Guide).
Total quality management (TQM) is seen as playing a key role in developing and maintaining quality in distance education institutes. It has also provided management with applicable models, systems, tools and techniques in the field of distance education, which take account of the complexity of distance education systems. TQM has created a new focus on accountability. The definition of quality is no longer based on what the management regards as appropriate, but rather on the customers' and the students' perceived needs, expectations, and preferences.
Teachers
Nunan (1991) draws attention to the fact that the majority of studies on quality in distance education focus on the opinions of managers and consultants (advisers), who regard the distance education system as an enterprise. What is lacking in the studies of quality in distance education are the perceptions of teachers. Teachers' perception of quality may generally be academic or subject-oriented, i.e., they judge quality from the perspective of a particular discipline. However, there are also generic factors which affect quality in distance education when thinking of the work done by tutors or teachers at a distance.
Customers, students
A product becomes a quality product when it is of value to the customer. This is one thing that seems to be universal in most approaches to defining the word quality, that is concerned with customer satisfaction (Bradbery, 1991).
In the end, students in distance education systems are in the best position to assess the quality of any particular distance education programme. They buy, use and perceive not only the physical products but also tangible and intangible services, such as marketing, counselling, tutors' behaviour, etc. Their judgements of quality are personal and subjective, based on their individual needs, demands, desires and experiences. They may have different levels of expertise when it comes to determining the quality of a particular study programme. However, their judgements are decisive for the future of any study programme, because the student-customer is the one who makes the investment in terms of money, time and effort. In the TQM philosophy the goal of any successful study programme should be satisfied customers who feel they have received good value for their investment. Satisfied customers continue to study and pay for tuition and recommend programmes to their colleagues and friends. While there will a
lways be differences in quality assessment between individuals, the management should be especially responsive to group feedback. A differing individual judgement may be a cause for personal feedback or corrective practice but a negative or diminishing value judgement made by a group should give rise to more pervasive actions for quality improvement.
A Comparative Study
The majority of studies concerning quality in distance education have focused on perception of quality among separate interest groups, such as the students or the management. Nunan (1991) draws attention to the ways in which different factors mentioned in research studies may be combined in the debate on quality in distance education.
Indeed, the assessment of quality can be understood as a comparison between the perceptions of various interest groups. Traditionally, it has been the management and educational staff who have defined quality aspects when interpreting 'quality standards' necessary to guarantee the satisfaction of their students.
The question remains as to whether the management and educational staff are able to understand what their customers, the students (as users and payers of their educational services), really think about quality in distance education. Is the management and educational staff able to draw the same conclusions about the relative importance of various quality components in distance education? Do they attach the same satisfaction standards to the present quality as the students? Where does the discrepancy lie in their relative assessment of the present quality?
I shall attempt to answer these questions with the help of the survey results of the AECS Quality Guide project. The principal objective of the survey was to provide basic information for the AECS Quality Guide project by collecting and analysing data about quality perceptions and preferences among managers, teachers and students. I was myself responsible for this survey, supported by the AECS/R&D Committee.
The management data were collected at the AECS conference in Berlin in May 1993, where 50 directors and other decision-makers of private European distance education institutes were interviewed. A student survey was conducted at some selected private distance education institutes in England (Business Training), Finland (Institute of Marketing, IM), The Netherlands (Dirksen Opleidingen) and Norway (NKI), where 71, 172, 25 and 31 students respectively completed the questionnaires.
The 'Educator Roundtable' was involved in a survey among educators and tutors: 9 in Norway, 11 in England, 9 in The Netherlands and 49 in Finland.
At the IM, a selection of 172 students representing 8 study programmes at three different levels (basic, intermediate and higher) were surveyed. The students interviewed at the other institutes are said to be 'representative' for the institute. However, it is difficult to estimate how well they represent the whole student body at these institutes.
Overall assessment of quality
The questionnaire asked the respondents to indicate the relative importance they attached to different criteria in terms of their significance to quality in distance education. Do management and educational staff draw the same conclusions about the relative importance of various factors as students?
Highly-valued quality components
The respondents valued a few criteria as very important or important. There seems to be a high degree of consensus between the different interest groups as to the relative importance of the variety of quality components in distance education. Written study material keeps its number one position in the minds of all interest groups; and in the second position are the overall tutors' work and homework assignments. Naturally, tutors themselves rate their work and homework assignments higher than any other group.
The management of distance education institutes (AECS) appear to consider the component of the 'course totality' to be less important than other interest groups. Either the management is really underestimating the significance of the decision concerning the structure, content and the system of study programmes or the management takes 'course totality' for granted, for example, courses as standardised versions (correspondence courses), and therefore may attach less value to this component than students. Data collected at the IM allows a more detailed analysis of this component.
The management and educational staff clearly stress more the collective factors, such as the general targets of a course, interaction between tutors and students, and versatility in selecting media. Students, on the other hand, stress the individual factors, such as the correspondence between the education programme and personal goals, a suitable level and duration of the course, the opportunity to use study time flexibly. In a Dutch survey (an unpublished paper) conducted by Dirksen Opleidingen, correspondence students similarly assessed the correspondence between the education programme and personal goals as the most important quality components, i.e., how they can benefit from the course in work situations and in enhancing their career prospects.
These results indicate a potential risk, namely that in course planning individual quality components may be underestimated only if the management and educational staff's views on quality are know, while those of the customers are not.
Less highly-valued quality components
Components which may be regarded as extension factors besides conventional correspondence education, such as tutoring and feedback received by computers, new teaching media, face-to-face teaching (with the exception of IM), and interaction between students and tutors by teleconferencing, are considered of less importance by the different interest groups.
Generally speaking, both management and tutors consider the 'extension components' of conventional correspondence education of less importance in terms of quality than the above-mentioned core factors. Teaching and service facilities also rank high on the list of quality components. This result is not surprising, as tangible service factors are concretely discernible, and they usually score highly in education quality studies. IM students and tutors find face-to face teaching connected with distance education more important than other interest groups, probably because it is part of the IM's normal course practice.
In the light of these results, the management considers the extension components of the conventional correspondence education of less importance than the students do. In addition, the use of new technology is considered of less importance even though new educational technology is a hot discussion topic.
Those interviewed felt that the components of the education programmes of their own distance education institute, i.e. factors of a rather conventional correspondence model, were the most important in terms of total quality.
This may partly result from the fact that neither students nor the majority of the staff have experience in the application of new technology in the distance education field. This conclusion was also reached in the survey carried out at Queensland University of Technology in Australia.
Their [students'] limited experience of potential services might encourage them to accept uncritically those provided for them (Scriven, 1991).
The analysis made of the IM material supports this argument. Although students consider regular contacts with the educational staff an important quality component, they do not consider the use of new technology relevant to quality in this context. Tutors, more than students, consider new technology an important component. This regards both communication with students and the utilisation of new media as part of the study material. It is likely that tutors interpret the components of technology from a slightly different perspective from that of students. Tutors seem to stress the function of didactic desirability, whereas students again stress the function of individuality, such as the personal accessibility of media, for example 'easy access to micro computers' or 'e-mail'.
Should we, on the basis of the quality preferences of the management and students give priority only to the products of the conventional correspondence education, such as printed material, home assignments, and tutorials (in IM also face-to-face teaching)? The answers are yes and no. If the distance education institute intends to keep the same profile of students, it has to guarantee the quality of its basic product. However, the training market is changing, and potential new clients may value features in distance education different from those valued by the present students. Moreover, the quality preferences of students who are enrolled in different types of courses may be totally different. A survey conducted by Dirksen Opleidingen refers to this. According to this survey, students who have chosen face-to-face teaching and residential studies consider the components of lecturing staff and teaching location as among the most important ones. For the students of correspondence education these are of
no particular value.
If a distance learning institute wants to attract students who prefer face-to-face elements, it has to include face-to-face elements into its education programme and thus lay special emphasis on the quality of the components of lecturing staff and teaching location. On the other hand, applying new teaching technology for the education programme of a distance education institute may be important for competitive reasons.
Furthermore, the quality preferences of students seem to change once they gain experience with new technology, for example from the use of teleteaching. Teleteaching experiments carried out at the IM supported the hypothesis that the students' attitudes would change from negative to positive in the course of the experiments (Lampikoski, 1992). As Sparkes (1992) states, the quality effect depends finally on how well the teaching by media is carried out.
The knowledge of the relative meaning of the quality components for different interest groups alone may be a good enough reason to motivate students to study, but it will not be enough to guarantee customer loyalty. What is essential is how happy the customers are with the quality of key components that a distance education institute offers. A crucial question is how well your institute is performing in the quality areas of great importance to the students/customers.
References
AECS Quality Guide (1994), AECS/EC, (European Commission).
Bradbery, P. (1991), 'The Process is the Content', Quality in Distance Education: ASPESA Forum 1991, Atkinson, R., and McBeath, C. (eds.), Bathurst, (AUS), 90–101.
Lampikoski, K. (1992), 'Teleconferencing: A Step towards Synchronous Distance Learning', in Distance Education as Two-Way Communication, Ortner, G., Graff, K., Wilmersdoerfer, H. (eds.), Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 185–195.
Jakupec, V. (1991), 'Esoteric and Esoteric Concepts of Quality in Distance Education', in Quality in Distance Education: ASPESA Forum 1991, 250–263.
Nunan, T. (1991), 'University Academics' Perceptions of Quality in Distance Education', in Quality in Distance Education: ASPESA Forum 1991, 387–397.
Nunan, T., and Calvert, J. (1991), 'Investigating Quality and Standards in Distance Education: An Interpretation of Issues', in Quality in Distance Education, ASPESA Forum 1991, 396–406.
Robinson, B. (1992), 'Applying Quality Standards in Distance and Open Learning', SADE/EADTU Conference Umeå 1992, in EADTU News. Heerlen. 11–17.
Schools and Quality (1989), OECD, Geneve.
Scriven, B. (1991) 'Perceptions of Quality in Distance Education', in Quality in Distance Education: ASPESA Forum 1991, 439–449.
Sparkes, J.J. (1992), 'The Quests of Quality in Distance Education', in Distance Education as Two-Way Communication, 133–146.
Stewart-Smith, Y.C. (1994), 'Bringing Quality to Higher Education', First National Conference on Quality in Education, Dipoli, Espoo, Finland, 18–19 May 1994.
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