I met with Johan Thorbiörnson (KTH, Stockholm) today. We discussed the problem of defining eContent Quality.

I think that it not possible to give any clear specification of what is good and what is not good. The field is changing so rapidly. New ideas on how to use the web, and new devices come up with such a phase that even the best eContent today may become obsolete tomorrow.

That eContent is good which is being used and which leads to results. Search engines and tracking tools help us to find out the winners in this competition.

While it seems difficult to define in specific terms what the characteristics of good eContent are, one may approach this by discussing examples.

Johan Thorbiörnson is heading a large scale operation in Sweden. He has about 10 000 (ten thousand!) students who study mathematics and other courses offered by his organization.

We agreed in that the most valuable part of this kind of educational eContent is the assessment system. Students must be able to practice, to get intelligent automatic feed-back, and the instructors must be able to see what their students are doing.

When dealing with such large numbers of students as what JT is doing, it is not possible for the instructors to have much individual interaction with the students. The process needs to be automated.

There are three levels of mastery of a topic:

• Basic understanding of the facts. This can be automatically tested with multiple choice questions or with simple questions where the answer is a string.
• Technical mastery. This can be tested automatically with problems that require sophisticated computations based on the subject matter.
• In depth mastery. Here students must produce a presentation in which the student shows that he or she has mastered both the concepts and the techniques of the learning unit, and that he or she can use them.

To test in depth mastery of a topic is tricky. In a small course, like the courses given at universities or in a high school class, the instructor can test in depth mastery of students individually. If you are teaching thousands of students that is not anymore possible. The solution that JT is using is to split students into groups of four and assign each group a task. The students are then supposed to discuss together and come up with a solution of a complicated problem or write a presentation. The students will, in such a process, teach each other. The role of the instructors is then simply to supervise this activity. In this way we could teach very large numbers of students.

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