Benchmarking as a quality improvement tool in higher virtual education: An example of an experience in Poland

Universities employ different tools to achieve the highest quality in virtual education, among them benchmarking. Through comparative assessment, benchmarking allows obtaining knowledge about the quality of virtual education offered by other universities and identifying the reasons for such quality. The main objective of this article is to present the results of benchmarking applied to the Polish Virtual University, which was developed and implemented using the author’s own benchmarking methodology. To perform the analysis, the Open University of Catalonia was chosen as the partner university. The results indicate that the Polish Virtual University still has much room for improving the quality of its virtual education despite the fact that some comparative criteria (teaching units and virtual platform) show it to be on a par with the partner university. Nevertheless, according to other criteria, such as the strategic plan, the educational stakeholders and the teaching- learning process, the partner university outperforms the Polish Virtual University. Through benchmarking, we have obtained solid results to draw up and implement a complete action plan for improvement, which will make it possible to improve the quality of the virtual education offered by the Polish Virtual University in the short to medium term. Finally, it is concluded that benchmarking is a useful and effective tool to improve the quality of higher virtual education.