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This article is the first of a planned series of “topics for debate” that will be a regular column within the pages of Educational Technology. The objective is to focus on issues within the general field covered by the magazine that either are highly topical and already being hotly debated, or else are largely being ignored but maybe should be generating debate. My role, and that of my occasional collaborators (I have one today), will be to “stir it up”, by addressing the issue in as provocative a manner as is deemed “politically correct” (by the magazine’s editors). Your role, as reader, will be to respond to the challenge, adding your insights and comments to the debate.

Quality Assurance in Distance Learning: some micro, macro and mega issues.
Alexander Romiszowski
(Educational Technology 46/4, July-August 2006, pp57-59)
Promoting Quality in Distance, Flexible and ICT-based Education.

This rather lengthy title is the theme of the next ICDE World Conference on Distance Education, to be held September 3-6, 2006 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is significant that this theme and its sub-themes, as explained on the conference site (www.icde22.org.br), were generated in debate between representatives of over a dozen distance education institutions from nearly so many countries. Obviously, a large number of practitioners of distance education consider the issue of quality assurance to be worthy of debate.

To start the ball rolling, let’s analyze how the ICDE conference planners view the topic. First of all, it is significant that they felt the need to use a somewhat lengthy title for the main theme – one that highlights the relatively new ideas of flexible learning (anytime, anywhere, etc.) and e-learning (ICT-based) in addition to the basic idea of learning at a distance. This raises the question, in my mind, of the extent that the “new”, ICT-based approaches have changed or raised new quality-related issues, as compared to the “old” methods of distance education, or indeed of education in general. Are we facing new challenges, or the same old ones that we have never adequately addressed? Second, it is interesting to see how the planners have subdivided the overall theme into sub-themes, to reveal the complexity of the topic and its systemic structure. This structure will help us to organize our own thinking and discussion with respect to the many issues involved. In the following sentences, I will follow the example of the ICDE22 website and shorten the full version of the conference theme to the acronym “DFICTE”. 

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