Mega Universities
Mega-universities are institutions that have more than 100,000 students world-wide. For a list of these largest dedicated providers of ODL worldwide see
http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-URL_ID=42857&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
The UNESCO site also hosts Insung Jung's Quality Assurance Survey of Mega-universities , published as Chapter 7 of McIntosh, C. and Voroglu, Z. (eds) Lifelong Learning and Distance Higher Education, COL Perspectives on Distance Education Series Series (2005). The entire book is available at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001412/141218e.pdf
Individual University Web-sites
Generally, the Quality Assurance procedures of individual universities are not available for public access. Excellent material is however available in the form of eight Fact Sheets on Quality and Standards in the Open University of the UK. The Fact Sheets also contain links to other relevant QA sites. Some of the internal links are only available to registered users of the UKOU intranet. The fact sheets are accessible from www.open.ac.uk/pdg/lto/qa/p3.shtml and cover the following topics:
Fact Sheet 1. Institutional management of quality and standards
Fact Sheet 2. Framework for academic quality and standards
Fact Sheet 3. Internal Review
Fact Sheet 4. Assessment and Awards
Fact Sheet 5. Collaborative Awards
Fact Sheet 6. Student Support and Guidance
Fact Sheet 7. Staff
Fact Sheet 8. Accountability to Stakeholders
Up-to-date information about the development of quality assurance mechanisms at individual institutions and further useful links can be obtained from the twelve case studies contained in Badri N. Kohl and Asha Kanwar (eds) Towards a Culture of Quality, COL Perspectives Series (2006). The entire book can be downloaded from www.col.org/PSQuality.
