CEN/ISSS Learning Technologies Workshop, current working draft of Quality Assurance Standards

Brussels, 05 June 2002

Quality Assurance Standards - current working draft (pdf -310kB)

1.1 INTRODUCTION

This report was prepared by an appointed Project Team Quality Assurance (PT QA) and Guidelines, within the CEN/ISSS Learning Technologies Workshop. It summarizes the work of the project team and serve as a base document for future work.

The objective of the PT QA was to define a work program for standards, guidelines, and codes of practice for quality description and assurance during the lifecycle of a learning resource. The first was an analysis of existing approaches – the huge amount of approaches and their diversity leads to the recommendation that a harmonization on a European level will be necessary in the future. The PT QA focused on two main aspects: Process-oriented approaches and transparency of learning resources.

Process-oriented approaches specify procedures as well as requirements for certain phases of the lifecycle of a learning resource. We analysed different approaches, identifying their scope, methodology, and usability. Although the PT QA focused on the analysis of design and development processes, several representative product-oriented approaches have been taken into account to provide an insight into this class of approaches.

From this analysis a second focus emerged: Most approaches do not cover information for the learner. The transparency of learning resources means that the learner receives proper information about a resource as a decision help and to assure the provision of appropriate information.

The report shows the variety and diversity of approaches in this field, presenting different approaches being used in the community. The approaches show a representative selection – it was neither the objective to cover every existing approach nor to determine the quality of the approaches.

The first section deals with the terminology in the field of quality assurance. It covers definitions for basic concepts and methods, as well as the terms used in this report. The following chapters correspond to the phases of the project schedule:

The section on classification schemes deals with approaches to classify and categorize approaches, methods, and concepts of quality assurance.

This classification scheme is the basis for the analysis phase in which existing approaches of QA are classified, analyzed, and evaluated. Additionally, current standards and approaches are analyzed concerning information for learners.

The last part deals with the synthesis which combines existing approaches and identifies requirements and potential approaches for QA in the field of learning technologies.

In the appendices, the terms of reference for the PT are listed. Best-practice approaches are identified and listed in the useful resources section.

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