Developing an assessment tool for online learning education : the iPace experience

Thanks to technology development and internet diffusion, Distance Learning in Higher Education is increasing a lot in the last years. The purpose of this work is to investigate the Distance Learning world. Starting from the literature it’s clear that the missing point is related to a concrete evaluation of costs needed to develop and deliver these courses and the analysis of the effectiveness of online learning linked with quality and student performances but also student engagement. In order to fill these gaps, it’s been proposed a dashboard of indicators that takes into account all the essential elements for a complete Distance Learning monitoring: student satisfaction, internal efficiency, financial perspective and social & student engagement. For the sake of completeness the dashboard is been applied to a practical case, the online program of Pace University in New York City: iPace. Data have been collected through interviews and at end, emerged a list of 10 indicators that university’s stakeholders consider the most important to measure at the moment.