Assessing the Quality of Materials‐Based Teaching and Learning

In this article Derek Rowntree of the Open University UK's, Institute of Educational Technology, examines the implications of quality assessment for distance education and other forms of materials‐based learning. He suggests that materials‐based teaching cannot properly be judged in quite the same terms as the conventional, face‐to‐face teaching that academic peers are most familiar with. So what might they be looking for when they come to assess the quality of a department's materials‐based teaching? And what might we expect to result from such assessments?