Editorial

For providers of adult and continuing education, the quality of their services is hard to comprehend: The offerings are diverse and strongly differentiated, providers are themselves responsible for quality assurance and development, and the different systems available for quality assurance and certification are hard to compare to each other. In addition, quality should always be evaluated from the learners’ perspective since in the end, education and learning remain highly subjective and personal matters. As a result of the intensive discourse on quality in Austrian adult education, many providers have started to use quality management systems or quality certificates. The present issue of The Austrian Open Access Journal for Adult Education (Magazin erwachsenenbildung.at in German) continues the discourse on quality and describes several systems and procedures of quality assurance and certification plus the experiences gained from using them. For the first time, a nationally accepted recognition procedure for existing efforts in quality assurance taken by continuing education institutions is introduced: the quality framework for adult education in Austria (Qualitätsrahmen für die Erwachsenenbildung in Österreich - Ö-Cert in German)