Assessment of qualities of pandemic-driven e-content developed for higher education in India

Abstract

The quality of e-content had been identified as one of the major constructs impacting the quality of e-learning and students’ satisfaction. During the time of Covid 19 pandemic, a surge in the development of e-contents had been noted. Moreover, the new scenario also pushed the debate on the quality of e-learning that directly or indirectly included the issue of the quality of e-content. The present study aimed to assess the quality of e-contents prepared during the pandemic period for higher education students in India against the standards laid down by different studies and models of e-content development. A manifest analysis approach as a part of the quantitative content analysis method was employed. The sample size consisted of 60 e-contents from the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes of education discipline. Half (50%) of the e-contents selected from e-content repository and remaining 50% were collected from faculty of HEIs directly. A three-stage selection criterion was formulated to select the e-contents from both sources. In agreement with the three categories of quality assessment (standard, substandard and not-suitable), only 23.3% of e-contents were found of standard quality. Two factors could be attributed mainly to this poor quality of e-contents, one was the lack of training to developers of e-content and the second was the lack of quality control mechanisms for developing e-contents at the institutes of higher education in India.