This article by Sepúlveda-Parrini, Pineda-Herrero, and Valdivia-Vizarreta offers a broad and well-grounded perspective on the quality of online higher education (OHE), situating it within the context of the expansion of this modality following the pandemic and ongoing digital transformation.
Based on a robust qualitative design that combines interviews with 50 institutional informants from 18 Chilean higher education institutions (HEIs) and questionnaires completed by 3,152 students and 727 instructors, the authors describe perceptions and construct new conceptual categories to understand what “quality” means when learning takes place in virtual environments and involves adult, non-traditional students. The combined use of NVivo coding and lexicometric analysis adds rigor to the process and allows the transformation of isolated words into consistent conceptual frameworks.
One of the study’s main contributions is the identification of a clear tension between a traditional view of quality, centered on graduate profiles, accreditation, standardization, and the fulfillment of measurable standards, and emerging perspectives that highlight the particularities of OHE: flexibility, balance between study, work, and family life, pedagogical design, equity, institutional support, the value of technology, and individual qualities such as autonomy and responsibility.
While authorities and institutional informants associate quality primarily with accreditation, goal alignment, and standardization, students and instructors tend to link it to balance, learning, and methodologies, assigning a decisive importance to flexibility as a constitutive feature of the modality. The article thus succeeds in showing how neoliberal and technocratic discourses (market logic, scalability, indicators) coexist with more human, contextualized conceptions centered on the learning experience.
As a critical contribution, the text is especially valuable because it does not merely describe quality models but questions their neutrality and highlights their political, commercial, and often exclusionary nature. By proposing categories such as “quality as equity,” “quality as balance,” or “quality as individual attributes,” the authors shift the focus from external certification to the real study conditions of adult learners, people who work and have caregiving responsibilities, inviting readers to rethink quality beyond quantitative indicators.
Among the study’s strengths are the breadth and diversity of the sample, methodological triangulation, and solid theoretical grounding. The article offers a highly useful framework for rethinking the quality of OHE from a critical and situated perspective.
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How to Cite: Sepúlveda-Parrini, P., Pineda-Herrero, P., & Valdivia-Vizarreta, P. (2024). Key concepts for quality in online higher education. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 27(1), 319–343. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.27.1.37633
