You will need to address the questions:

• How will you quality assure "e" courses?
• What does the QA need to cover?
• To what extent do "e" courses impose additional QA effort?

Again, this is an area which throws up the tension between wanting to "do things well" and "not putting people off". Most of the argument will revolve around the issues of content with staff often reacting with: "Well, nobody asks me to QA the notes I give out or slides I use!" Of course one response to this might be "Well perhaps they should be QA'd as well!" But issues of usability and accessibility in particular cannot be ignored...

eLearning imposes Quality requirements over and above those associated with face-to-face delivery. These requirements need to be addressed throughout the design and development stages. All too often, they are not addressed, or addressed too late.

Support

It is particularly important that learner support information is clear, comprehensive and easily found. Learners may become quickly demotivated if they are not able to find the support they need. Such information needs to cover:

• What support is available? Note that it is important to consider the question of equity of support for eLearners. Whilst it is perhaps obvious that they may need technical support, they will also need access to library facilities. Traditional support services usually extend to careers advice and counselling services for example. To what extent can/should these other areas of support be available to eLearners?
• What level of support? You also need to be clear about the levels of support offered. For example, what level of IT support can eLearners expect? Help with installing and operating the software? Help with using peripheral software such as word processing? Help when their computer crashes?
• When is the support available? You need to state the times when each area of support is available - it is extremely frustrating to be confronted by an answerphone when attempting to get urgently needed support.
• How is the support to be made available? By 'phone? Email? Advertise contact information clearly.
• Response times. Advertise clearly when learners may expect a response to requests for help, and what to do if they do not receive one.

Ensuring usability

Usability is the term used to describe how easy to use software and computer-based materials are for the general user. This is a key quality consideration for eLearning. It is important to address not just aspects relating to the way course materials are visually presented (e.g. font size), but also writing style.

Ensuring accessibility

A critical quality consideration relating to equity of participation is how easily all aspects of the course can be used by disabled people. This is often summarised by the term accessibility but it is important to ensure equity of not just access to the course but of participation and attainment of outcomes. This poses an enormous challenge for educational institutions, but one that they are legally bound to address. The SENDA (Special Educational Needs and Disability Act) passed in 2001, puts an onus on education to make reasonable adjustments to ensure that disabled people are not disadvantaged.

Clear IPR and other issues

This often very time consuming task cannot be avoided. However the section editor has not found anyone brave enough to have a formal mechanism to answer the question: "Does the content of the course break copyright or is plagiarised?" Perhaps the JISC Plagiarism Service could be used?

In addition, what QA do you apply to repeat deliveries of courses?