Online Education Learning Centers In The Quality Assurance System: Problems And Countermeasures

Nowadays, the higher education has become the focus of governments, academia and the society, both in developed and developing countries. The network distance education, a novel higher education style, has arisen and attracted more attention. In China, doubts never stopped on the feasibility of the network distance education. This is caused by the internal properties of distance education, its resulting dualism and the incapacity of our quality assurance systems.The network distance education today can be greatly attributed to the success of the Open University in British, whose quality assurance systems has been the paradigm for the other network universities. Besides its support service systems, e.g. learning centers set all over the country, have also been followed all over the world.Learning center, which is established all over the communities by the distance education colleges, is the grass-roots organization for learning support and service system, the activity base for distance teaching and learning, the two-way communications of distance education and teaching information and the distributing center of teaching resources, the node and terminal for distance educational information technology facility to spread and radiate the communities.(Ding 2002) Learning center plays an significant role in that it bridges the distance education establishments and the students who receive them. The misunderstanding about learning center, the incomplete establishment, the unsound management all play a part in determining the detour we have experienced in Network Education.Under the guidance of my supervisor, I participated in many research projects concerning the network distance education and published several important results concerning the Quality Assurance and Evaluation Systems. From these experiences, I realized that the student support service, especially the learning center, is essential in the quality assurance system of network distance education. So "The learning center in the quality assurance systems of the network distance education: its problems and solutions" were chosen to be the topic of my master thesis. Through literature review, comparisons, investigations and case studies, this paper summarized the problems in the learning center setting for the network education in colleges of China and point out the corresponding solutions. Based on the literature review (Chapter 2), comparisons of the network education were performed between China and foreign countries (Chapter3). The history and current situation of the learning center setting were reviewed and its role and functions were discussed under the background of the quality assurance systems and student support service systems in the network education (Chapter 4). Finally, the case study on the learning center setting at the School of Network Education of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications were analyzed, problems were summarized and corresponding solutions were proposed (Chapter 6).