Title: Quality criteria for online education - Content criteria
Course: Digivisio - DEMO course template > Section: Designing learner-centred education

This page contains summaries of various quality criteria teachers should be aware of when they are designing and teaching e-learning courses. This page focuses on content criteria. The basis for the list is the Auditing criteria of Lauraea AMK Master’s level online courses. The list has been modified to be applicable in other situations as well, and it is has been compared with other commonly used criteria and guidelines, e.g. eAMK quality criteria ( Quality criteria for online implementations .)

The aim of the content criteria is to ensure that the contents support the goals of the course, and that the contents meet the expectations of the learner. This list of criteria is also strongly connected to accessibility, although accessibility is included in the action criteria. However, it is good to emphasise certain content characteristics, for example structuring materials, which may not always be an apparent accessibility aspect.

Criteria | Description/example
Competence base: the tasks, assignments, and activity contents are clearly connected to the competence goals and match the scope of the course.
- The tasks enable reaching the competences outlined in the learning goals.
- If the competence goals mention, for example, “analysis”, then the tasks need to include assignments, which require an analytic approach. Analysis skills are also evaluated.
The implementation, structure, and learning environment enable development-based learning.
- If it suits the course, you can integrate into it a project, which supports development-based learning.
- In other cases, include tasks which develop working life skills.
Contents and materials are up-to-date and gathered from reliable sources. | - Content and materials meet the competence levels of the course.
Using research-based data in learning tasks. | - The learner uses relevant, scientific, research-based data to support their arguments.
Text and page structure support the legibility and learnability of the content. | - Text pages have a clear structure: introduction, logical paragraphs, they are not too long, tables, images and graphs support the text etc.
Licencing
- The course is CC licenced and copyrights are made clear.
- Licence and creator information on the course front page.
The right to use the materials is confirmed. References and copyright information are clearly marked.
- The copyrights of the materials allow their use. Also mention the copyright of any material you have created yourself.
- If the material does not have a CC-licence, mark its rights clearly.
- References and copyright information is mentioned for images, videos, and texts. If you are using CC-licenced material created by somebody else, always mention the creator information and the licence used.
Potential use of AI is considered.
- The "Start here" -page, or similar, contains information about the use of generative AI (is it allowed etc.)
- The use of AI is instructed.

Soureces and resources:

- HAMK - eAMK laatukriteerit, PDF - eAMK-verkkototeutusten laatukriteerit: suunnittelu
- eAMK - Library of Open Educational Resources - Quality Criteria for Online Implementations