Thread:QUR criteria (1)

Hi all,

I have had a quick read of the quality assurance materials and I am concerned that the number of criteria looks too onerous for folks already putting in the time to develop a quality product. I feel that more flexibility is warranted. Viewing it from my own field, the desirable qualities for teaching third-level biology are very different from those needed to teach primary-school science. Some specifics:
 * Adherence to the style guide. Before I realized that the style guide was still in development, I had a bit of a knee-jerk negative reaction to any sort of a style constraint.  I think that there are times when such constraints might be warranted (I certainly enforce some on my students), but it is a bit more of a reach to imagine a style that will work for most projects.  Perhaps I'll sing a different tune when I see the style guide.
 * Number of criteria. As new users begin to utilize the wiki format, they may or may not bring all of their ideas here, nor all parts of their typical course.  Personally I use WE as a tool for collaborative writing; from a teacher's point of view the wiki documents effort, shows developmental trajectory of a project, and prevents version creep.  The workshop portion of my course is here but I don't tend to place content here nor do I evaluate content knowledge here.  For me at least, I would not expend the effort to meet all of the criteria simply to achieve featured content status.  However, I could imagine that many academics would.  Many institutions require peer-reviewed work as a condition of career advancement; if work on WE is to count in that category, we do need fairly strict but achievable criteria.
 * One potential approach would be to preserve or even expand the existing criteria but use a menu approach whereby a project would be required to meet some minimum number of criteria; perhaps a minimum number of criteria in each of several categories (sounds a bit like a boy scout merit badge approach). In that way, an outreach project that excelled in providing well-organized content in an accessible manner, but completely lacked evaluative materials could be favorably reviewed.
 * Multi-author requirement: I like the collaborative approach here, but I think we should drop this requirement because solo-author work has value and should be rewarded.  The Chemistry work recently donated to WE and uploaded by Denis Doe is a prime example.
 * Identifying reviewers: Those who have participated in traditional publishing have perhaps had to suggest reviewers on occasion, but in my field at least it is more common that an editor solicits reviews.

This is a start. I appreciate the work done to establish a system. I think once more folks are actively interested in a review system there will be more input.

All the best.. dmccabe 19:20, 16 February 2009 (UTC)