Strengthening the Internal Quality Assurance Mechanisms in Open and Distance Learning Systems

Introduction

The term quality is a difficult concept to define. The concept is easily misconstrued because of its rather nebulous characteristics. While many people have a fair idea as to what they construe the quality of a phenomenon or an object to be, they find it difficult to define the term. Dictionaries define quality as degree of excellence. This suggests that quality is not some kind of fixed, immutable target or destination that may be attained merely by striving sufficiently hard, but a dynamic or moving target whose attainment at each point in time is facilitated by a set of strategies that are themselves also dynamic(Ekhaguere, 2006).

In industrial organizations, where the assembly line production format is popular, control measures are used by managers to ascertain and sustain the credibility and standard of the product being released into the market. According to Duncan (1978) there are two types of control measures for goal attainment –feedback control and preventive control. While the feedback control is based on the information from the end-users of a product regarding the performance of the product, after they must have obtained and made use of it; preventive control relies on preventive planning to minimize variance or deviation in the production process. Quality assurance is a component of the preventive control mechanisms which involves ensuring that all intermediate products in production process conform as much as possible to specifications. It is believed that the lack of variance in intermediate products guarantees final product quality, all things being equal.

In the past, quality issues were not among the major concerns of educational institutions, because the excellence of formal training and knowledge was taken for granted. At that time, educational institutions focused more on ensuring that their offerings are of certain universally predetermined standards. These standards, formally referred to as Academic Standards are normally identified by features such as the depth of content and duration of a course of study; the transactional treatment received by learners at a given period of time, which is defined by classroom teaching, tutorials and the practical sessions that learners are exposed in the course of their training; and a standard norm of evaluating learning achievements, through assignments and end-of-term examinations. These standards had characterized educational systems for centuries and it is regarded as a common denominator of all that is necessary in all educational institutions.

However, as the global environments enlarged and educational institutions expanded in size and numbers, there arose the need for benchmarking the value of the instructional content given to (clients) or seekers of knowledge. Thus, different quality assurance agencies were put in place in many countries of the world to ascertain the credibility of educational programmes on offer in all institutions of learning - conventional, distance including online. Many of these external quality assurance mechanisms have been somewhat effective in setting bench marks and minimum academic standards below which all relevant institutions are not expected to fall. The implementation of quality assurance procedures in educational organizations according to Broadfoot (1994) in Afemikhe (2004), involves defining appropriate criteria, accreditation of institutions, visits of verifiers and use of assessment panels. Moderation of examination questions and scripts also forms part of the quality assurance process as it seeks to reduce sources of errors. Harlem (1994) identified two levels of moderation and these are: adjusting assessment outcomes to improve fairness, and putting in place processes of arriving at fair assessment. These factors point out the roles which are played by the external quality assurance and accreditation agencies within national and international boundaries. According to Barney Pityana, Vice Chancellor of UNISA, external quality assurance begins with accreditation as a service provider for distance higher education programmes which government through possibly a Higher Education Commission or another independence system or mechanism. However Daniels (2006) observed that no quality assurance system should be transplanted from one institution to another across organizational, social and cultural boundaries. The development must be home grown from its context.