Quality Assurance/QA Toolkit

= QA Toolkit for Open and Distance Learning for Non-Formal Education= Source: Quality Assurance Toolkit for Open and Distance Non-Formal Education, by Colin Latchem, Commonwealth of Learning, 2012

Getting started
Stick to the facts and make sure there is evidence to support all your judgements and statements. Otherwise, the quality of your (educational) QA will come into question. (p. 82)

But rather than starting by using these inputs as predictors of quality, we suggest you assess the outputs, outcomes and impacts first, and then refer back to the quality of the inputs to see where, why and how things went wrong or right. Traditionally, measures of quality were exclusively or largely based upon the inputs because they were easy to observe, measure or compare, and believed to be highly correlated with educational success. (p. 82) But essentially, QA is a matter of, as James Ling said, “Don’t tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done,” or as Peter Drucker observed, “Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It’s what the customer gets out of it.” (p. 84)