Stop Saying “High Quality”

abernard102@gmail.com 2015-03-30

Summary:

"The Open Business Models conversation at the Hewlett Foundation grantees meeting (#oer2015) was a lot of fun. The biggest surprises to me were the number of times the phrase 'high quality' came up, and what a strong, negative reaction I had each time I heard the word. After some reflection I think the reason the phrase gets my goat is that 'high quality' sounds like it’s dealing with a core issue, while actually dodging the core issue. The phrase is sneaky and deceptive. (Now I don’t mean that the people who were using it were trying to be deceptive; they weren’t. But the phrase itself tends to blind people.) And by 'core issue' I mean this – the core issue in determining the quality of any educational resource is the degree to which it supports learning. But confusingly, that’s not what people mean when they say that a textbook or other educational resource is 'high quality.' It’s very easy to demonstrate that 'the degree to which it supports learning' is the only characteristic of an educational resource that matters. If an educational resource is written by experts, copyedited by professionals, reviewed by peers, laid out by graphic designers, contains beautiful imagery, and is provided in multiple formats, but fails to support learning, is it appropriate for us to call it 'high quality'? No. No, no, no. A thousand times no ..."

Link:

http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3821

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.education oa.pedagogy oa.textbooks oa.quality oa.impact oa.prestige oa.books

Date tagged:

03/30/2015, 20:19

Date published:

03/30/2015, 16:19