Quality evaluation of online university education based on benchmarking practice

Benchmarking is a tool that, through comparative evaluation, allows to obtain knowledge about the quality of online education in another university and to identify the reasons why better results are obtained in this one in order to apply them in the university itself. The purpose of this article is to analyze comparatively some initiatives of this type of benchmarking, focusing on the criteria proposed to evaluate the quality of online university education and to establish which the most relevant criteria for this evaluation are. The bibliographic review is synthesized, which deals with the comparative analysis of some initiatives carried out by institutions from different countries: universities, accreditation organizations and online education associations. The results of the analysis show that to date benchmarking is not very frequently applied to evaluate and improve the quality of online university education. The criteria used during benchmarking allow evaluating the quality level of different areas of online education, strategic management, institutional context, technological infrastructure, student satisfaction, teacher, pedagogical aspects, as well as the design, development and results of the course delivered online.