Quality assurance of eLearning

This year, the E-Learning Africa conference took place in Windhoek, Namibia. Once again, this event provided us with the opportunity to promote most effectively our initiative for quality assurance in E-Learning.

Presented at eLearning Africa, May 31 2013, Windhoek, Namibia

https://www.dropbox.com/s/f4j88120rebb16p/IMG_3227.jpg print quality Dave Cormier is an educational activist, researcher, online community advocate and the Manager of Web Communications and Innovat...

At a basic level a MOOC offers free access to a collection of educational resources that together form a logically linked progression. Quality here is the value and relevance of the resources and how they are linked. Many MOOCs have little or no qualified tutoring or guidance, only offering online arenas for student communication and offering learning materials. These arenas can be quality assessed for their functionality but most of what goes on there is out of the control of the organisers. Maybe the real quality issues of the MOOC phenomenon lies in the “value-added” services that are on higher layers than the course material. If tutoring, guidance, validation and examination are available at a price then these add-ons can be more easily assessed and quality guidelines set up. Or maybe quality is in the eye of the beholder.

The MOOC Quality Project is designed to bring together a global group of experts and first movers in the field of MOOCs. We would like to challenge them and to see what are their thoughts on how to discuss MOOC quality. We would like to invent the language of MOOC quality in this project – join us and see where it leads us.

The MOOC Quality Project, an initiative of the European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning (www.efquel.org),  attempts to stimulate a discourse on the issue of Quality of MOOCs. A series of BlogPosts  of worldwide experts and entrepreneurs will address the issue from each particpant’s viewpoint. After each blogpost we will allow a one week period of time to react and comment on the post made available. At the end of the week  the discussion will be shortly summarized and made available to all.

  Gráinne Conole is Professor of learning innovation at the University of Leicester. Her research interests include the use, integration and evaluation of Information and Communication Technologies...

This post argues that the current discourse around the concept of xMOOCs (primarily based around interaction with content and essentially adopting a behaviourist learning approach), and cMOOCs (which focus on harnessing the power of social media and interaction with peers, adopting a connectivist learning approach), is an inadequate way of describing the variety of MOOCs and the ways in which learners engage with them. It will introduce an alternative means of categorising MOOCs, based on their key characteristics. It will describe how this can be used as part of the 7Cs of Learning Design framework, to design more pedagogically informed MOOCs, which enhances the learner experience and ensure quality assurance.

Summary of scholarly peer review of teaching initiative presented at IADIS Conference.

Week 2: The Quality of Massive Open Online Courses by Stephen Downes

Early research into user experiences of the Unistats web-site, published today, shows that it is one of the most widely used higher education course comparison web-sites, and that universities and colleges rose well to the challenge of providing a new data set.

Since its launch in September 2012, the Unistats web-site has received over 3.8 million page views and over 175,000 unique visitors – an average of 984 new visitors per day. The site is used extensively by prospective higher education students, their parents, careers advisers, teachers and higher education staff.

Alistair Creelman writes:

How can we assess quality in a MOOC? Is it even possible to have quality assurance in an educational form that is constantly developing and is already split into several distinct categories?
Over the next couple of months I will be helping to run a blog called The MOOC Quality Project under the banner of EFQUEL (European Foundation for Quality in E-learning) together with colleagues Ulf-Daniel Ehlers and Ebba Ossiannilsson. The project will feature leading experts in the field of open education who will take turns in writing a weekly blog post on how they see the issue of quality in MOOCs.