Surviving Education's Internet Revolution

Why has the study of effective standards for online education grown steadily, beyond the usual confines of departments and colleges of education, in contrast to the level of interest in the higher education classroom? The process for online and blended course creation and improvement at the postsecondary level has engaged individuals and institutions in ways seldom experienced in face-to-face education. This work increasingly involves teams of individuals who need to share and collaborate in order to succeed. And the successful course, or even the well designed learning object, is itself an artifact that begs to be shared, analyzed and improved. This sharing begins locally, but spreads quickly to become regional, national, and even international. The collaborations that result from this phenomenon and the courses that are thereby strengthened, term by term, hold promise for the continual improvement of online education, year-by-year and version-by-version. This volume of Internet Learning is predicated upon work by individuals from the Quality Matters(TM) Program-an internationally recognized leader in quality assurance for online education, and by individuals who have conducted research studies based upon the Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric and course review process. It captures a small, but significant, sample of the kind of detailed analysis of online education toward which engagement with QM typically leads. Studies such as these are essential toward advancing quality in online teaching and learning, and will undoubtedly impact classroom-based education as well.