Quality Standards and Key Areas of Online Education in European Union (original) (raw)

Developing Successful Strategies for Global Policies and Cyber Transparency in E-Learning

Integration of information and communication technology with education science produced new concepts such as distributed learning, integrated learning, blended learning, flexible learning, hybrid learning, open learning and online learning. Learning in the process of information society transformation has become one of the most strategic concepts. The world conjuncture for all disciplines focused on learning to learn and lifelong learning culture. The European Union has gathered various programs such as Erasmus, Leonardo da Vinci, Comenius and Grundtvig under the umbrella of LLP (Lifelong Learning Program). In this context, learning to learn and lifelong learning approaches are defined as the 21st century student characteristics. Online courses shown as a way to teach these skills to the students. Starting from this reality in the world's developed countries, the number of online courses offered increases. Online courses can be counted with activating the accreditation systems by both face to face online training and regular educational institutions. In the USA at college education one of the three students takes an online course. In Europe, there is research on online education in order to develop economy based on information. In Europe, some leading institutes in online education area such as EADTU, EUA, QAA, ENQA, OUUK claim that there are problems and issues in online education, and there is necessity of increasing the quality in online education. For this reason, there are studies on online education by the same institutes regarding how to improve the system and to put regulations of standardization. In the current contribution, we summarized the studies on defining the quality standards of online education. Further, we introduced the quality standards definitions by the online education institutes in Europe, and covered related topics.