What Determines Quality in Training?

A workshop on identifying quality criteria was offered at the CALMet Conference, September, 2015, in Seoul, Korea. The participants were presented with this scenario: You are reviewing a training announcement from an unknown provider in a topic area you are interested in, but you would like to know about the potential quality from a reading of the announcement before investigating further.
Participants were asked to work in small groups to develop criteria within three areas: Organizational, Processes, Product. They were also asked to assign priorities to the criteria as time allowed.

The resulting draft criteria lists compiled from their decisions was then compared to a previously prepared draft list of criteria, which was developed from a review of several existing quality management systems for educational resources. These included ISO/IEC 19796, ISO 29990, Open ECBCheck (for eLearning courses), EFQUEL (for eLearning programmes), Commonwealth of Learning (UNESCO), and the WMO Competency Requirements for Education and Training Providers. Approximately 6 additional systems were examined.

New suggestions for criteria from the workshop were added or merged with the existing ones.

What came out on the top? See the list below, as well as the more complete report. Many more important criteria are contained there, as well as a discussion of the results.

Organizational

•How trainers are hired, trained, and evaluated
•Existing accreditation that covers vocational training, or existing quality assurance processes
•Numbers, roles, and qualifications of training staff members (including access to content expertise)
•Location/country, accessibility (including online presence)
•Facilities, resources, and technology infrastructure

Processes

•how learning outcomes are specified and how they inform the training content and activities
•Good development and delivery processes, documentation of processes, ISO certification (if used)
•How learning needs are determined
•how training is evaluated and improved

Products (including both courses and resources)

•currency of the content (up to date)
•learning activities match learning outcomes, opportunities for students to apply what they learn
•the relevance of course content to job competencies
•assessment methods, matched to learning outcomes
•performance-based learning outcomes
•Timing of courses (Duration and scheduling)
•the results of past evaluations of this course or resource (or related ones), student recommendations


Conclusion

Thanks to those who participated in developing these draft criteria!

As work continues to decide how quality information might be shared, in a WMO Global Campus Shared Calendar and future learning resource Registry, for example, the discussions to date should provide some useful input. But they also raise several issues for further debate.

•How does accreditation relate to quality assurance of vocation training and individual courses and resources? Is additional QA still useful?
•Does ISO 29990 certification cover the required criteria? Is more quality information required for specific resources and courses?
•How can we apply quality standards that are inclusive of many types of training centers and units?
•Is QA information voluntary, or mandatory? How will it be communicated?