OF TASMANIA

The development and provision of standards for online units is becoming a common practice in tertiary institutions that provide online teaching and learning. The University of Tasmania is taking a further step in this regard by implementing a quality assurance system for online units to ensure a minimum level of quality and consistency across all online units. This involves sets of standards, checklists, institutional processes for data collection and unit release, and the provision of data to key stakeholders. The implementation of the system has been underway since 2001 and the system has been fully activated for the first time in semester one 2003. This paper presents an institutional and contextual background to the system; an overview of the system; current implementation issues/findings, and some of the lessons learned thus far