Defining Quality
Before assuring quality, one has to define quality. In a static environment for example a printed book, quality will be as good as the final product.
With a new concept like WE quality will automatically improve as the final product will not be static.
From one point of view it may be more important to protect the original work and allow further changes and contributions to enhance or/and facilitate knowledge.
This unique feature of adding and changing may be the key to the success of WE. For some students to understand the process and see how certain portions were added is a natural way of learning, like in a documentary.
A certain way of presenting a subject may be easily understood by some and not others. Therefore for me quality will be as good as the archiving process in a medium such as WE.
Nadia,
I agree with all that you say here. I think the quality we are looking for is the depth of learning or the facilitation of knowledge aquisition. And how do we protect the original work yet also allow it to be enhanced. I believe it is important to recognize that different groups communicate and learn differently. I believe that different groups would also see quality differently... We need to have our quality initiative set up in such a way so it allows creative freedom, encourages contextual learning and a contextual definition of quality. There are aspects of the MediaWIki software that protect the versions of work. I also believe that the idea of having a featured resource and a featured reuse is a good place to start. I believe this discussion thread speaks to the dissonance of making no assumptions of what quality should look like in WE and the requirement of having a quality story within WE.
I believe if we have a number of good (non-restraining) context neutral featured items (learning resource, reuse material, institution and project) we would be starting QA within WE... How the community takes over from there would be an interesting thing to participate in...
Peter, Nadia
I think that we have the principles for the development of our QA and review process well defined and we will see to it that we have adhered to the principles. Its our QA measure <smile>.
In addition to the thoughts expressed here, I think WE should also have a mechanism for some kind of optional peer review. This can be enabled with technologies like [Revisions]. Therefore -- without the need of locking down pages -- users can opt for the latest peer reviewed version or the latest unreviewed edits. Some course will use this feature, others wont. I suspect that we might consider materials of different "levels" or phases in the QA system, for example:
- Draft phase - single author. Does not want QA feedback, so no templates like "needs citation" are placed on the page.
- Draft phase - collaborative authors. Does not want evaluative feedback, so no templates like "needs citation" are placed on the page
- 2nd draft phase - Opening up the resource for community QA input and feedback which then gives "permission" for all sorts of QA related templates to be inserted on the pages.
- Optional nomination for featured resource and featured reuse and corresponding community processes which take a decision on this
- Peer reviewed content -- where some trusted group expresses a value judgment.
This will need a lot of work, thinking and refinements -- but gives some idea of a typology within our QA and review thinking.
