title: Quality assurance for online nursing courses.
abstract: Nurse educators and students have been expressing concern about the quality of online education for more than a decade. Models, standards, benchmarks, and peer review processes now offer tools for assuring the quality of online education and provide documentation for evaluation and accreditation processes. Standards provide the basis for initial course design, thus decreasing the need for revisions to correct weaknesses. This article reviews the literature on standards and quality assurance processes for online courses. Recommendations for the use of standards, peer review, and quality assurance of online courses are discussed.
authors.affiliation: College of Nursing, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32610-0187, USA. bblittle@ufl.edu
authors.forename: Barbara Battin
authors.initials: BB
authors.lastname: Little
mesh_terms: D000068:Accreditation; D019985:Benchmarking; D003194:Computer-Assisted Instruction / Q000592:standards*; D003479:Curriculum / Q000592:standards; D004508:Education, Nursing, Baccalaureate / Q000592:standards*; D005181:Faculty, Nursing / Q000458:organization & administration; D017408:Guidelines as Topic; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet / Q000592:standards*; D017145:Models, Educational; D015402:Nursing Education Research; D009862:Online Systems / Q000592:standards*; D010380:Peer Review; D016730:Program Development / Q000379:methods; D015397:Program Evaluation / Q000379:methods; D011786:Quality Control