In the E-Learning world SCORM is a big thing because it is the leading framework for supporting the interoperability of complex arrangements of learning resources. The latest release of SCORM 2004 dates back to 2009, which is already 4 years old. However, pretty much from the beginning SCROM 2004 has been considered as “too complex”, “too complicated”, or even “too limited” to be a big success. As of  2013 the interoperability geeks in the community have a new hope that everything will be better, easier, and nicer: TinCan. I start reading about that TinCan will be the next successor of SCORM. The latest remark comes from Moodle’s Dan Marsden. This is surpising to me and it should be surprising to you as well. In this article I explain why.

See on lo-f.at

Dave’s keynotes in the last couple of years have centred around how coming to know is a messy, imprecise process at once intensely individual and necessarily embedded in a community – Rhizomatic Learning. You can follow him on twitter at http://twitter.com/davecormier or follow his thoughts at http://davecormier.com

See on mooc.efquel.org

Week 2: The Quality of Massive Open Online Courses by Stephen Downes

See on mooc.efquel.org

Consultation events for the UK Quality Code for Higher Education – Part A, Chapter B1, Chapter B6 and Chapter B8

QAA is opening its consultation on the content of Part A: Setting and maintaining threshold academic standards, Chapter B1: Programme design and approval, Chapter B6: Assessment of students and accreditation of prior learning and Chapter B8: Programme monitoring and review.

The four consultation documents, background information, and guidance about how to respond will be published at the beginning of June.

See on www.qaa.ac.uk

Early research into user experiences of the Unistats web-site, published today, shows that it is one of the most widely used higher education course comparison web-sites, and that universities and colleges rose well to the challenge of providing a new data set.

Since its launch in September 2012, the Unistats web-site has received over 3.8 million page views and over 175,000 unique visitors – an average of 984 new visitors per day. The site is used extensively by prospective higher education students, their parents, careers advisers, teachers and higher education staff.

See on www.hefce.ac.uk

At a basic level a MOOC offers free access to a collection of educational resources that together form a logically linked progression. Quality here is the value and relevance of the resources and how they are linked. Many MOOCs have little or no qualified tutoring or guidance, only offering online arenas for student communication and offering learning materials. These arenas can be quality assessed for their functionality but most of what goes on there is out of the control of the organisers. Maybe the real quality issues of the MOOC phenomenon lies in the “value-added” services that are on higher layers than the course material. If tutoring, guidance, validation and examination are available at a price then these add-ons can be more easily assessed and quality guidelines set up. Or maybe quality is in the eye of the beholder.

The MOOC Quality Project is designed to bring together a global group of experts and first movers in the field of MOOCs. We would like to challenge them and to see what are their thoughts on how to discuss MOOC quality. We would like to invent the language of MOOC quality in this project – join us and see where it leads us.

See on mooc.efquel.org

The MOOC Quality Project, an initiative of the European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning (www.efquel.org),  attempts to stimulate a discourse on the issue of Quality of MOOCs. A series of BlogPosts  of worldwide experts and entrepreneurs will address the issue from each particpant’s viewpoint. After each blogpost we will allow a one week period of time to react and comment on the post made available. At the end of the week  the discussion will be shortly summarized and made available to all.
See on mooc.efquel.org

QAA prepares for European review

Self-evaluation report

As part of QAA’s own reviews of higher education provision, universities, colleges and other providers are asked to submit reflections and a critical analysis of their own activity in the form of a self-evaluation report.

ENQA is no different. QAA has already submitted a self-evaluation report to the review team. The report summarises QAA’s activity and progress since the last review, and indicates how QAA meets each of the European standards published by ENQA.  The self-evaluation report  was developed by QAA, in consultation with its Board of Directors, its Student Advisory Board and Sounding Board, as well as other stakeholders.

See on www.qaa.ac.uk

The 2013 Biennial Conference will take place in Taipei, Taiwan, from the 8th till the 11th of April, 2013. The Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT) will be the host of this international conference.

See on inqaahe.heeact.edu.tw

8th European Quality Assurance Forum  : Working together to take quality forward

See on www.eua.be