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Quality: its relevance to e-iearning
According to Joseph Juran and Philip Crosby, "quality" implies "fitness for use" and "conformance to specifications". That is, the quality of a product is such that it does exactly what the users want it to do. In case of software products, fitness of purpose is usually interpreted in terms of satisfaction of the requirements laid down in the system requirement survey (SRS) document. For an e-learning product, this can be considered wholly true.
Alternatively quality can be defined as conformance to explicitly stated functional and performance requirements, explicitly documented development standards, and implicit characteristics that are expected of all professionally developed e-learning products. The quality of an e-learning product is an important concern for users. They not only want the product they purchase to be highly reliable, but also often wish to check the quantitative estimation of the reliability of a product before deciding to buy it. Most e-learning providers find it difficult (and expensive) to furnish the customer with products that have quality characteristics that are always identical from unit to unit or module to module. There is a certain amount of variability in every product. For example the colour intensity of the screens in two modules in a course -or even in the same module - may not be same. If this intensity variation is small, it may have no impact on the customer. However if the variation is large, the customer may want to change the product. The customer -whether purchasing for his or her own needs or for those of an organization - is the key decision maker for selecting an e-learning product from competing products and services.
Dimensions of quality of an e-learning product
Understanding and improving quality is a key factor leading to business success. There is a substantial return on the investment to be had from improved quality and from successfully employing quality as an integral part of overall business strategy.
Most customers of e-learning products have a conceptual understanding of quality, related to one or more desirable characteristics of the product or service. These characteristics are known as the dimensions of e-learning product quality and are:
* Portability. An e-learning product is said to be portable if it can be easily...