Description

Not all educational materials are of good quality. Moreover, the quality of materials that are constructed openly, in a collaborative fashion, evolves over time. The Quality Assesment Expert Group's task is to design mechanisms that will enable users to identify materials that are of good enough quality to be used in courses, as well as materials that still need their contribution to get better.

The quality assessment of materials from a very wide-ranging, rapidly changing technical field, which are themselves in constant change, is an unsurmountable challenge if approached with the standard quality assurance mindset. The QAEG will design novel ways of combining technical tools such as revision control systems with on-line questionnaires and analysis of social dynamics to infer the relative quality of materials throughout their lifecycle.

Mission

SELF aims at delivering contents its users can rely on being accurate and useful in class. However, decentralized, collaborative authoring lends itself poorly to run-of-the-mill approaches to quality control.

The Quality Assesment Expert Group's job is to come up with innovative mechanisms that can harness the power of loosely-coupled collaboration to achieve the apparently contradictory goals of delivering high-quality content without placing obstacles to the community's freewheeling creativity.

The QAEG will advise the development team, exploring different approaches of appraising learning material's quality without imposing rigid structure to the material's creation process. It will apply those mechanisms to materials in the project, and experiment with different ways of interpreting social dynamics and weight assigment to different criteria. It will identify different dimensions in which a material can be evaluated, such as technical accuracy, pedagogical usefulness, popularity, etc, and find ways to combine them into an aggregate quality rating. It will interact with the SELF community to collaboratively evaluate the results of the appraisal, and find ways to make them match general quality perception as closely as possible.

The Quality Assesment Expert Group is led by Federico Heinz of Fundación Via Libre, a member of the SELF consortium.The group's members include:

• Beatriz Busaniche , Fundación Vía Libre
  
• Machtelt Garrels, The Linux Documentation Project
• Núria Ferran Ferrer, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
• Rosanna Forestello, Fundación Vía Libre
• Markus Deimann, FernUniversität Hagen