These procedures cane easily be used for academic tuition. If it is only tuition, there is little problem.

However, if the student's work is assessed for a grade, the assessor must establish their authenticity, that is, that they are not plagiarized or colluded. The present normal procedure is either to require a written statement by local supervisor that the work is authentic, or to require an oral examination or defense (e.g. by phone call interview) of the student's ideas upon which the essay in based.

Many other issues affect accredited study.

The tutor might be obliged to follow a curriculum, and might either prescribe topics or delineate the areas in which students may develop topics.

He/she might need to provide information as email enclosures or on CD, although reading is difficult on a computer monitor, and it may be unrealistically expensive for the student to print hard copies. This leads to non-emailable sources, such as paper books, local data from the students' field-based research, and local libraries. A list of websites makes possible a wide range of resources, but it also must be read on a monitor and needs on-line internet time.

Other factors also affect students. Students need to know enrolment information at the beginning of the unit, for example, the purpose of the unit, assessment protocols, the appeals procedure and the semester schedule. It might be best to provide by email an outline of assessment standards. Specific assessment criteria would be given later when they are more relevant, and discussed with the student. To dump a long list of criteria on students at the beginning of the unit confuses and frustrates them without helping them.

Procedural standards cover issues of planning, conducting, evaluating and reporting of both teaching and assessment. Planning and conducting are part of the procedure, but the review is different. It will usually require a feedback form to be emailed to students, for responses to be sent by email to a neutral third party, because students cannot respond to the tutor anonymously by email.

To get progress reports from students doing longer papers, it is also possible to break larger research pieces in stages: topic, proposal, literature review, methodology, data collection, analysis, implications, introduction, and even to chapters.