Evaluating the Quality of Distance Education Services by Using Modern Information Technology

Abstract

With the development of the society, distance education and training gradually shows some characteristics similar to the service industry, such as invisible, cannot be stored, heterogeneous, serving and consuming in the same time and so on. To gain a bigger market share in competition and more reputation and brand value in development, distance education and training institutions must pay great attention to the satisfaction and acceptation of its students for its teaching. The rapid development of modern Information Technology (IT) brings new opportunities to promote the quality of distance education services. In this paper, we design an evaluation index system based on an "IT application fields - service quality promotion" two dimensions framework. The dimension of IT application fields includes academic and non-academic student support services. The dimension of service quality promotion includes tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. The quality of student support services is measured by the SERVPERF method. Finally, we also provide a case study from The Open University of China(http://ouchn.edu.cn/) to validate our assumptions.