Kidney, Gary, Cummings, Leslie, Boehm, Azalea. “Toward a Quality Assurance Approach  to E-Learning Courses.” International Journal on ELearning 6.1 (2007): 17-30. Print.

http://er.dut.ac.za/bitstream/handle/123456789/60/Kidney_2007_Toward_a_Quality_Assurance_Approach_to_E-Learning_Courses.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Gary Kidney is a professor in academic computing with a well respected career in a number of university. He is currently the Deputy CIO for Academic IT Solutions at Yale University.  All the authors of the article are professors in the field of computing or education and have great authority on the subject of the paper.

The purpose of this paper is to examine previous attempts made by the University of Houston-Clear Lake (UHCL) to establish what it meant to produce a ‘quality online e-learning course’ and to create a model to ensure the production of quality online learning resources. The article looks at what makes a quality course and specifically looks into the production process that UHCL employed when designing their courses. In the end the article agrees that UHCL’s methods for designing  quality e-learning courses were, to a certain degree, extremely successful and thought the authors warn that “quality is one of those things that can only be pursued and never attained”, they do conclude that the methods taken by UHCL to create a quality course may serve as a model that could be followed in the future of designing online learning facilities.

This is a scholarly paper and the intended audience are professors or professionals in this field. It is an extremely strong paper in that it goes into great detail about the methods used by UHCL to create a quality course however it is by no means a definitive study of quality e-learning courses. It only describes one institutions attempts at creating an e-learning course and can really only be read as a specific case study and not an overall analysis of the field.

The information provided in the article definitely supports our research paper to a certain extent. The e-learning product we are attempting to create is different from the e-learning course described in this paper however we agree with many of the fundamental principles at the centre of the research in this paper; that e-learning resources should be easy to use and navigate and informative yet interesting for the student.

I think this material is extremely relevant in terms of our paper. Although it is talking about a different kind of e-learning resource it touches on many of the issues we will need to address in our paper and will be a really great tool in guiding our research. The paper includes several tables and models about the process of designing an e-learning course which I think will be vital in the next stages of our products development.