Quality ODL Provision: Stakeholder Perspectives

The DiscourseThe current issue of JL4D and the articles are devoted to the area of stakeholder perception of 'quality'.A major dimension of quality in education and ODL is stakeholder perception, involvement and satisfaction, which eventually facilitates the quality of the graduates and their employability and engagement in the world of work.Quality has generally been perceived to be elusive (in education in general and in ODL in particular), though the literature suggests that its understanding has been multi-faceted, conforming to the standards set for: i) conventional education, ii) fitness for purpose, iii) meeting customers' needs, iv) continuous improvement, and v) compliance with national/regional/international standards and requirements (Jung, 2022).The quality indicators applied to conventional education are generally complied with by the ODL institutions, though there has been diversified perception and application across open universities as seen in a recent examination of their business models (Mishra & Panda, 2025).A recent analytical study on quality assurance in ODL -the Association for Evaluation and Accreditation of Open and Distance Education Programmes (Toprak & Sakar, 2020) -lists ten criteria for ODL programmes: students, educational objectives, programme outcomes, continuous improvement, curriculum, faculty qualification, infrastructure, institutional support and financial resources, and administrative structure, and programme-specific criteria.Quality assurance policies, benchmarks and toolkits for ODL and online/ blended learning are available to institutional leaders and practitioners for reflection and further application (Bates, 2021;COL, 2019;Latchem, 2016;Mishra et al., 2025;Saxena & Panigrahi, 2019).Technology plays a significant role in institutional management, teaching-learning, learner support, professional development, and inclusive education (Panda, 2025) and how AI/GenAI reshapes the entire educational operation including personalised learning, skill development, institutional effectiveness, teacher agency, research and development (OECD, 2026), and learning by students with special education needs (OECD, 2025).In this context, technology integration and stakeholder engagement for technologyenabled learning at macro, meso, and micro levels strategised by the COL (Mishra & Panda, 2020); the framework of policy-technology-capacity building for managing change in TEL-ODL (Panda & Mishra, 2020), and the framework of preparation-development-maturation on TEL intervention at the institutional level (Sankey & Mishra, 2019) are not only useful to the Commonwealth countries but more so to the developing and underdeveloped nations for institutional transformation through technology.Large-scale teacher development is still possible with the use of low-cost technology and open-source technologies with significant involvement of various stakeholders including the