Quality: a systemic affair

1. Purpose of education

Education, and education in mathematics in particular, is meant to improve human thinking.

But, "before we can make it better, we need to know more of what it is" (Houghton, 2004).

2. Bloom's taxonomy

It is a well-developed paradigm for classifying educational objectives, in the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains.

“It is used by curriculum planners, administrators, researchers, and classroom teachers at all levels of education" (Anderson & Sosniak, 1994).

It is a de facto standard, and even more after its revised version (Anderson & Kathwohl, 2001), with the title "A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and assessing".

Here we will focus on the cognitive domain, where the classification is based on six (hierarchical) levels of complexity:

-Remembering

-Understanding

-Applying

-Analysing

-Evaluating

-Creating

This poses the problem (cf. Don Allen's contribution) of how high can eLearning aspire to impact in the thinking-learning hierarchy.

3. Who defines quality?

Quality is/will be defined by quality agencies, which operate at European, state, and regional levels in an organized network. We may hope to influence the definition of protocols for assessing quality of eLearning. Quality assessments, however, are systemic by its very nature: they look at the parts, how they fit and interact together, and how they serve the purpose of the object/program/organization.

4. Three main layers

There are three main layers to take into account:

- Macro-level (organizations, like universities and schools)

- Meso-level (programmes, courses)

- Micro-level (LearningWare)

The Macro-level provides context and conditions (cf. Anders Sanne) for the Meso-level, which in turn is built from the micro-level by aggregation.

Communication is an intrinsic feature of any "quality brand".

5. Research perspective?

It may be relevant to JEM to adopt a research perspective focused on contributing to build a theoretically sound quality framework with a due consideration of empirical evidence.

In such an endeavour it is required to take into account the customer/market viewpoints and political/social directives and structures.