KJC Korea
Journal Central

Quality is at the heart of education, including distance education. Over the past years, quality assurance in distance education has become even more important as distance education gains popularity and faces a period of borderless e-learning. We have begun to observe the development and implementation of quality assurance policies for distance education that are different from those for on- campus education,This paper is an effort to analyze important meanings of extensive research results in interpreting, integrating and evaluating the quality of distance education, explore some selected distance education cases in developing and implementing quality assurance mechanisms at the national and institutional levels, and finally suggest some future research areas and practical guidelines for quality assurance in distance education.

The University that had established in the middle age in Europe has been changed itself continuously interacting with society. But the university has been pressed to change more radical than ever before since 1990, Although the way and aims that each university has attempt to acquire varied according to the social condition of the university, yet there are common themes. In the perspective of lifelong learning society, I chose the three themes between them and argued for the each theme more concretely, The themes were argued in this article are! reconstructing the system of university in perspective of lifelong education, searching the new mode of education that integrate conventional education with distance education in the university, harmonizing the autonomous control with the public interest of university.

The rapid development of new technologies and widespread of networks demand a new paradigm in education to keep up with those newly emerged environment, In this context, e-learning, distance learning and the web-based online learning community have been paid plenty of attention from both theoreticians and practitioners, The primary interest in the web based online learning community(OLC) focuses on the collaborative learning. In the OLC, learners share information and knowledge by interactions based on reasoning and information exchange. However, similar to the face- to-face interaction, emotional aspects of communication cannot beelements frequently used in online learning communities 2) to categorize the emotional elements in reasonably small number of factors so that they can be easily used by practitioners 3) to find out the frequencies of the emotional factors in accordance with the dimensions of interactive messages(Henri, 1992). Two hundred and forty elementary students and three teachers participated in this research. Participatory observation, questionaire and interviews were administered. The result of the research showed that there are six dominant factors (pleasure, concern, disappointment, anger, pride and delightfulness) of emotional expressions in OLC, And also showed that there exists significant relationships between the emotion factors and the dimensions of messages. In other words, certain emotion factors are rather frequently used by certain dimensions of messages. The importance of the integration of emotional factors in the designing of OCL was discussed and practical guidelines for the practitioners were suggested.

The paper tries to figure out the nature of a collective experience’ and the process of its formation in understanding the structure of the experiential learning discourse. From our viewpoint, it is epistemologically problematic that the ‘experience’ can be portrayed under the individual-centered approach which treats it as an isolated property of some kind of ‘possession’ in each individual, As J, Dewey points out, experience is constituted by the interaction of human organism and the environment, in that each experience, although individually acquired, embodies the collective context and the ‘relationship’ as its key component. That is, in the learning process through experience, even if any learning seems to be very individualistic, it manifests itself the dependent aspect on the relationship in the web of the total organization of one’s experience. Based on the proposition, this paper spotlights on the aspect of ‘relationship’ , that is one of the important attributes of the experience. We supposed that learning in one’s experience is conducted actually in the dimension of the ‘relationship’ between the two or more experiences. Also, we can see the very meaning of learning even as individual dimension only when we magnify the scope of examination from individual to collective dimension along with focusing on the relationship of each experience being synchronized.

This study is to research e-learning status in higher education and its implementation strategies for the quality education in higher education, For this purpose, the meaning of “e-learning” especially in higher education was carefully defined through literature review and case studies. Secondly, a survey to higher education institutes was conducted to investigate current e-learning status in each institute and get implications of implementation strategies. As a result of this study, e-learning in higher education is defined as “a digital teaching and learning system which enables meaningful learning experiences by means of internet and digital technology and prompt educational services which support self-regulated and interactive learning at any time, any place, and any pace.” This study suggests possible e-learning policies for quality education, competitive and balanced development in higher education. These suggestions include:1) strengthening the main subjects-professors and students-and building professional organizations, 2) building sufficient infrastructure and setting up necessary environmental factors, 3) improving teaching and learning experiences, 4) developing standard digital contents and management strategies. More detailed tactics for each suggestion were listed in this study.

With rapid changes of the social contexts, the necessity of the lifelong education and reeducation is gradually increasing in our society. The need of distance education is emphasized consequently, and the quality assurance of distance education is regarded as an important issue. The students' distribution of the Open University if various, For example, it is composed of the various students from diverse areas, ages, occupations and the educational backgrounds and so on. Like these factors are important points in acadcmic achievement of students, Then what is important point in the acadcmic achievement of students in Open University? What is the common feature of students who are high on academic achievement? In this work, academic achievement of students by groups for the quality assurance of distance institution was analyzed. In results, the basic information of efficient studying plans by group was discussed in detail.

In a distance education system, a tutor plays a critical role to supporting distance learners due to its own human nature, As research reports tutor’s unique effects on student achievement, satisfaction, and persistence in learning at a distance, distance education institutions are reassessing the value of tutors while trying to build up more effective systems that can work for their students. Among others, the case of the Open University of Hong Kong(OUHK) was analyzed in this article under the themes of tutor selection, training and support, monitoring, and rewarding. For the analysis, the author drew upon two publications from OUHK: Tutor Training Course and Course Coordinator Training Manual. Some characteristics on the ways OUIIK operates her tutor system were identified in the article, as they reveal the institution’s efforts to quality distance education,

This paper reviewed how the discourse of lifelong learning used by the EU has changed significantly over time. Based on the theoretical model of Fairclough and Foucault, it interpreted the historical shifts in the key nuances of lifelong learning discourse for the EU by demonstrating the periodisation of lifelong learning discourse. After critiquing the wide range of policy texts, this study concluded that neo-liberal, egalitarian liberal, and social democratic discourses have been continuously intertwined with each other in the EU over the last four decades which is currently being converged into under the overarching heading of Europeanisation.