EContent Quality

The six phases of mathematical competence from the (US) National Research Council book "Adding it Up" indicate the following levels in hierarchical form.

• Mathematics Proficiency
• Conceptual understanding
• Procedural fluency
• Strategic competence
• Adaptive reasoning
• Productive disposition

Good EContent can possibly address the first three of these. The first is roughly the same as Basic Mathematics and the third is roughly Technical Mastery. The online teaching of conceptual understanding is possible through videos with practice problems and applets. The last three are more difficult for eContent and likewise for classroom teaching.

All of the said let me outline necessary conditions for EContent Quality. First the feature set of the EContent must be complete. There must be text, video lectures and problems, interactive applets, practice testing, and online testing. In addition, there needs to be feedback loops from testing events to the EContent. Students must have immediate feedback for errors and recommended remedies to their errors.

On a higher plane, the materials overall must be engaging and attractive to students (and even faculty). This is essential to keep them coming back and in fact to be engaged to an extent where they may exceed their own expectations. The word “engaging” currently forms a central point of all pedagogies, and is regarded as the first essential step to student learning.

Now to measure whether the quality of the EContent competes with the traditional teaching/learning modes, we begin with an analogy. Consider the EContent and the Traditional as two factories each producing a product – a student completing the same material. To compare these products there must be crossover at the next course level. That is, students taking the EContent must switch to the traditional mode for the next course and have similar success rates as the continuing traditional students. This validates the quality at a meta-level, that is to say independent of how precisely it was delivered.

For example, when we began teaching WebCalC (Calculus I), our online calculus more than ten years ago, students were asked to take the same common midterm exams. Grade averages were competitive with the traditional mode. However, when they took the next course (Calculus II) offered only in the traditional mode, we measured their performance compared with all students. The grade point ratio of the WebCalC students, now fully integrated into a multitude of traditional sections, was slightly higher than for the traditional students. This validated our online course and its quality irrefutably. So the new factory (EContent) produced a product of quality undiminished in comparison with the traditional factory.

To my mind this is the best way to validate EContent; it is certainly the only way to command the respect of our technologically reluctant colleagues and administrators.

Of course, exit satisfaction surveys are a vehicle to determine satisfaction with the EContent. Students tend to be sincere and honest in such surveys, and much can be learned from their views – provided the right questions are asked.