INACOL National Standards

iNACOL, the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, is a non-profit membership association based in the United States, representing a divers cross-section of K-12 education. Its aim is to ensure all students have access to a world-class education and quality online learning opportunities that prepare them for a lifetime of success.

One of the activities of iNACOL is developping national K-12 online learning quality standards. In October 2011, the National Standards for Quality Online Courses (version 2) and for Quality Online Teaching (version 2) were released. Both standards were selected, based on the original standards, the results of a research review and survey of online course quality criteria. Further on they were evaluated and assembled into an easy to use document for evaluating online courses and evaluating online teachers with common benchmarks.

The National Standards for Quality Online Courses is a measuring tool to help policy leaders, schools, and parents across the nation evaluate course quality and implement best practices. Quality criteria are focussed on Content; (2) Instructional Design; (3) Student Assessment; (4) Technology; and (5) Course evaluation and support.

The National Standards for Quality Online Teaching was designed to provide teachers with a set of criteria for effective online learning and to guarantee that the teachers are better able to understand the technology, new teaching methods and digital course content in an effort to foster an personalized online learning environment for every student.

The National Standards for Quality Online Programs, released October 2009, completes the triad of iNACOL’s online education quality standards. It was designed to provide states, districts, online programs, accreditation agencies and other organizations with a set of over-arching quality guidelines for online programs in several categories: leadership, instruction, content, support services and evaluation. Focus is on institutional standards, teaching and learning standards, support standards and evaluation standards.

Status

Since the original standards were released, other organizations have released quality standards for online courses. iNACOL organized a team of experts in the area of course development, instructional design, professional development, research, education, and administration to review these new standards and new literature around the topic and determined there was a need to refresh version one of the iNACOL standards, which was done quite recently (October 2011).

Over the past years, iNACOL has received feedback that several organization are using these standards in the development and review of online courses and programs.