Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Most challenges are related with management in Higher Education institutions and the difficulty of considering students as “clients” more than “users” and definitely different of “products”.

In addition, there are not particular quality models fully adapted to the educational reality. In some countries, lack of formal regulations considering ODL in the same level of conventional education is also an important handicap. On the other hand, some norms are too manufacturing process-based integrating too many administrative issues, so a need of inclusion of pedagogical approaches is needed.

Nevertheless, the project is an interesting opportunity to develop and validate a set of pertinent and clear indicators that enable the measurement of results and give confidence enough in order to make growing a good image of ODL quality.

Most challenges are related with management in Higher Education institutions and the difficulty of considering students as “clients” more than “users” and definitely different of “products”.

In addition, there are not particular quality models fully adapted to the educational reality. In some countries, lack of formal regulations considering ODL in the same level of conventional education is also an important handicap. On the other hand, some norms are too manufacturing process-based integrating too many administrative issues, so a need of inclusion of pedagogical approaches is needed.

Nevertheless, the project is an interesting opportunity to develop and validate a set of pertinent and clear indicators that enable the measurement of results and give confidence enough in order to make growing a good image of ODL quality.

The emergence of a learning society and knowledge economy requires the transformation of the old quality reference framework. This transformation cannot be a mere adaptation of the old framework, but a radical transformation based on the new political, economical, sociological and technological context.

This empowerment of individuals through technologies has transformed the nature of the relations between learners and learning support staff, the learning employee and her employer and the learning citizen and his learning communities. The pervasive presence of, and ubiquitous access to, knowledge technologies provide the foundations for a seamless learning environment, linking individual, community, organisational and territorial learning, recognising to a fuller extent that learning occurs in context, learning is active, learning is social, learning is reflective. So is quality — and e-quality!

Quality management is a concept that has permanently grown up and been improved, and it integrates customer orientation, process orientation and quality orientation. Total Quality Management covers all the requirements of an Integrative Management concept. The revision and further development of the standard family ISO 9000:2000ff. have led to internationally accepted quality standards for the development and implementation of a quality management system and for its certification. Process-oriented quality management can look back on a long-term development that, in the sense of a continuous improvement process cannot be finished, but has always to be evaluated and further developed. For that reason quality will be remaining the complex crucial success factor for the entire management in the future.

Readers interested to get more on this quality model can download the complete version of the study in French and a lengthy abstract in English on Le Préau’s website (Preau). They can also get a thorough description of it on the EQO (European Quality Observatory) Repository and add, on the same data base, their return of experience while using it. It will be very interesting to confront how it fits in the various contexts of implementation and cultures of users. Probably, all together, we can refine it and make it more suited to a real European culture and context. A discussion forum, hosted by EQO, may help us to achieve this goal.

In this paper we established the need to define an accessibility application profile for learning resources and presented a methodology for defining such an application profile based on the three main accessibility dimensions. We presented the first step towards the definition of such an application profile. The proposed Accessibility Application Profile of the IEEE LOM has been developed in the context of CEN/ ISSS Learning Technologies Workshop as an initial proposal produced by our research group for consideration in the project team entitled “Accessibility properties for Learning Resources”. Future work includes the creation of an integrated accessibility application profile based on W3C and IMS ACCLIP guidelines utilising mappings of W3C WCAG with IEEE LOM, as well as, the identification of other content specific accessibility guidelines and application specific accessibility guidelines as influence factors to the accessibility application profile.

Quality becomes a decisive success factor in cross national business models for technology based educational services - besides the cost factor.

Existing quality approaches have a general disadvantage. The focus isolated quality aspects of technology, education or business factors.

The concept introduced here transfers traditional quality approaches to a new strategic approach. With the overall objective to provide successful business models, it integrates the traditional quality approaches into an integral perspective to quality. At this integration level technological, educational and economical quality parameters are related appropriately. The learner perspective serves as the central reference point.

The concept improves the quality significantly by concrete normative quality parameters which are embedded in a generic process-oriented quality framework.

The emergence of a learning society and knowledge economy requires the transformation of the old quality reference framework. This transformation cannot be a mere adaptation of the old framework, but a radical transformation based on the new political, economical, sociological and technological context.

This empowerment of individuals through technologies has transformed the nature of the relations between learners and learning support staff, the learning employee and her employer and the learning citizen and his learning communities. The pervasive presence of, and ubiquitous access to, knowledge technologies provide the foundations for a seamless learning environment, linking individual, community, organisational and territorial learning, recognising to a fuller extent that learning occurs in context, learning is active, learning is social, learning is reflective. So is quality — and e-quality!

Quality management is a concept that has permanently grown up and been improved, and it integrates customer orientation, process orientation and quality orientation. Total Quality Management covers all the requirements of an Integrative Management concept. The revision and further development of the standard family ISO 9000:2000ff. have led to internationally accepted quality standards for the development and implementation of a quality management system and for its certification. Process-oriented quality management can look back on a long-term development that, in the sense of a continuous improvement process cannot be finished, but has always to be evaluated and further developed. For that reason quality will be remaining the complex crucial success factor for the entire management in the future.

Now that we have the open standards in place to build a large scale infrastructure for learning, we can start focusing on quality, much in the same way that web search engines shifted focus from being exhaustive to providing relevant results.

With this paper, I’d like to call for more focus on the development of good LearnRank measures, rather than on only indirectly and partially relevant indicators of quality for learning.