Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This paper traces the origins of Knowledge Management as an academic area of inquiry and as a key managerial concern in contemporary organizations. This is based on an overview of related developments in a number of fields including Economics, Organisational Studies, and Information Systems as well as some of the important developments in the business environment in recent years. We proceed to analyse and critique the status of ‘organisational knowledge’ from both epistemological and pragmatic standpoints and to explore the challenges in designing processes and systems for sharing such knowledge in large organizations. We also discuss technology-enabled communities-of-practice and their critical role in knowledge management.

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 concept of quality underlines plural perspectives: there is not a unique vision on quality which can be considered the best one. This implies that quality has a “subjective”, contextual and “objective” components. The latter involves defining a set of common criteria by which the quality of e-learning can be assessed, but it is undoubted that the way that different stakeholders will weight the criteria can be very different.

If the object of the quality is defined as the “learning experience” considered in its three components - sources, processes and internal/ external context - quality means complexity and systemic view.

Every organisation/ institutions/ body which is working at any levels in an elearning system should be aware of the multiplicity and multiperspectives of the visions on quality and be ready to start a process of understanding other view points and negotiate the approach to be adopted.

The key elements for supporting European quality in e-learning are understanding, dialogue action and review of results to date, that is a typical quality assurance loop.

Furthermore, in this perspective it emerges the need to work together among the different stakeholders in order to define common needs and to start a fruitful and valuable peer learning process which represent the new frontier of the collaboration within the European scenarios.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this article, we have shown quality marks for e-learning, in particular the holistic, harmonised approach of the Quality Mark e-learning, QSEL. QSEL is directed to improve the quality of an organisation, as well as its products and services. The quality mark will be submitted to standardisation organisations in order to further harmonise quality marks and to ease the orientation for e-learning providers and customers.

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 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.