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If you're an online instructor or an administrator involved with distance education, you'll want to take a look at The Theory and Practice of Online Learning. This free, downloadable book contains many worthwhile essays about the creation of quality virtual learning programs. Here's a blurb:

"As with the first edition, this is a collection of works by practitioners and scholars actively working in the field of distance education. The text has been written at a time when the field is undergoing fundamental change. Although not an old discipline by academic standards, distance education practice and theory has evolved through five generations in its 150 years of existence (Taylor, 2001).

For most of this time, distance education was an individual pursuit defined by infrequent postal communication between student and teacher. The last half of the twentieth century has witnessed rapid developments and the emergence of three additional generations, one supported by the mass media of television and radio, another by the synchronous tools of video and audio teleconferencing, and yet another based on computer conferencing."

There are chapters about infrastructure, design and development, Quality control, and more. The work is available through Creative Commons. You can download it in PDF format by visiting the Open Access AU Press website.