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Deakin is a dual mode university with more than half of its students doing at least part of their study at a distance and with an entrepreneurial arm that provides distance education services for even larger numbers. Online provision has been developing over a decade, enriching traditional distance education in programs with mixtures of on- and off-campus students. It has been supported by central services and corporate applications, leading to reasonable consistency in the thrust. A current aim is to ensure that it is sustainable at a high level of quality.

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Abstract:Quality assurance, using a continuous quality improvement cycle of monitoring performance against goals and working for improvement, is essential to quality education at a distance. Guidelines and benchmarks are available to assist universities to identify areas of activity that should be monitored and to define quality practice. In a dual mode institution with onand off-campus students in the same courses, it is important to ensure that attention is paid to distance education outcomes among other competing priorities. Such quality assurance processes, however, may not adequately foster the knowledge building we desperately need to develop and extend good practice in online and distance education. Quality development, through such means as encouraging innovation and in-depth critical analysis of areas of strategic interest and concern, can be seen as a complementary process equally important to quality education at a distance.