Quality Assurance Issues for a Web-Based Degree in Motor Disability Assessment

Abstract

The growth of credit-bearing distance learning offerings and enrollments at accredited, degree-granting colleges and universities has been astonishing in the last few years. This growth raises the demand for reliable information about quality. According to Kess et al. (2002), quality in education should not be forced into one single definition, but rather a collection of smaller elements, processes, which contribute to education quality in different dimensions. These elements, when chained together, constitute the overall quality in training, and the improvement of quality is achieved through simultaneous action on all these levels. Furthermore, accreditation and quality assessment in education should not be considered as separate systems. They are an integral part of the continuous quality improvement context on the road to total quality. In this chapter we will discuss the approach adopted for ensuring the quality of the MODASPECTRA (MOtor Disability Assessment SPEcialists’ TRAining) Web-based degree: a research and technology development project funded by the European Union. More in detail, the procedures enacted for ensuring the quality of contents and the quality of the software tools developed, and of their documentation, will be discussed.