Quality Management Standards for Implementing and Developing Blended Learning in Romania: Case Study of the University of Oradea

There are several ways in which eLearning can be implemented in higher education. Because the IT applications can be perceived as being complicated by the users, and because their use does not always match well with traditional ways of teaching and learning, much care needs to be taken in the implementation and development of eLearning education systems. In this context, the University of Oradea, through its Department for Distance Learning and Reduced Frequency Education (DIDIFR), has developed and enhanced a quality assurance system that assists its management team to provide effective BL education, on the basis of the quality standards system imposed by the Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ARACIS). Based on a set of six quality assurance procedures that facilitate five distinct applications of eLearning, the system combines flexibility with an effective quality management structure and benefits from its clear step-by-step processes and self-correction through planned project reflection time. From these perspectives, three knowledge domains provide the context for this paper: quality assurance, higher education and blended learning. Their intersection defines the research problem that was investigated - the quality assurance of blended learning in the Romanian higher education system - focusing on the model developed during the last couple of years at the University of Oradea, which was taken as a study case. The research design is an instrumental case study, focusing on quality standards as a supportive medium, in a flexible, BL model at the University of Oradea, Romania. The research methods include the literature survey, case analysis meetings on developing and implementing quality management standards and students' surveys. The value of this study to the academic community relies in its findings, which include a taxonomy of critical success factors for BL, the identification of factors which promote student and lecturer's satisfaction/frustration with BL experiences, and lessons learnt by applying standard quality assurance theory to the instructional design process, in the context of the limits imposed at the Romanian education level.