External evaluation of the Unit for Open Distance Learning at North-West University, South Africa

"To ensure the quality of its Unit for Open Distance Learning, the North-West University in South Africa, ICDE member, undertook an external evaluation in  2015. The external evaluation panel was composed by international and national experts, among which experts from ICDE members UNISA, Commonwealth of Learning, The Open University, Dublin City University and EATDU. The Unit for Open Distance Learning situated at the North-West University, South Africa currently delivers open distance learning (ODL) programmes in Education, Nursing Science, Theology and Police Practice. Further ODL programmes in Business Administration and Information Technology will be delivered from 2017. The Unit serves approximately 32 000 students at 64 tuition centres across Southern Africa. Interactive whiteboards are mainly used to broadcast the lectures to the tuition centres. The Unit is a specialist unit and currently has 76 full-time personnel and more than 250 part-time. To ensure quality as described in above functions effectively is it necessary to have a quality assurance strategy in place. This strategy consists of various quality activities of which internal and external evaluations are important ones. It was then decided to undertake an internal self-evaluation of the Unit’s activities based on the Unit’s quality manual where after an external evaluation will follow. This internal self-evaluation also formed the basis for the self-evaluation report that was part of the documents prepared for the external evaluation ..."