User-Generated Content in Higher Education

Quality Assurance

User-Generated Content in Higher Education

Erlangen (GER), July 2010 - Very much due to its success, user-generated content (UGC) poses a number of challenges to the current understanding of education and its institutions. Web2.0 and the corresponding tools enable learners to develop and publish learning content independently from experts' knowledge and institutional frameworks. This development has led to questions as to whether the traditional concept of "authority" is still appropriate at universities and to suggestions for the "ivory tower" of higher education to be opened to the wider world.

Knowledge management becomes even more fundamental in this context than in the past. Moreover, the rapidly growing number of learning resources generated by users makes the issue of quality a pressing one. The CONCEDE (CONtent Creation Excellence through Dialogue in Education) project intends to address such issues and will present the first results at the EFQUEL Innovation Forum 2010.

The overall aim of CONCEDE is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by enhancing the quantity and quality of UGC that can be incorporated into higher education learning provision.

The specific objectives are:

to investigate the state of the art of actors, projects, and practices in relation to the quality of UGC, with specific regard to higher education;
to develop a holistic multi-layered quality framework of UGC to be introduced effectively into higher education. Such a framework is based on three layers: users' comments, reviews and ratings; institutional quality procedures; and dialogue and negotiations among the representatives of these two levels in order to reach a consensus;
to test the acceptance and effectiveness of this mechanism in higher education pilot experiences involving primarily teachers and learners and to foster cross-fertilization of experiences;
to create a platform for dialogue for all those seeking to promote UGC in education through national policy panels as well as dissemination and valorization activities. The platform will also serve those who seek to facilitate networking and collaboration among existing initiatives in universities, European and international projects (accompanied by a significant effort to involve international agencies), as well as among organisations dealing with quality assurance.

Preliminary results from desk research and stakeholder questionnaires will lead to the presentation of the current situation in Europe concerning the incorporation of UGC in tertiary education.

Extracted from Delrio, C., Kretschmer, K. (2010): Quality Assurance of User-Generated Content in Higher Education. Proposal Paper. IATED conference. Erlangen.

Interested in the quality assurance of user generated content? EFQUEL recommends participating in the OPAL/CONCEDE workshop on 08 September (free of charge), as well in the Parallel Session on user-generated content, which takes place within the EFQUEL Innovation Forum 2010.