The Online, Open and Flexible Higher Education Conference Hosted by FernUniversität in Hagen, 29-30 October 2015

Distance teaching universities (DTU) have always offered open learning courses in the form of short and affordable specialization courses targeted at a variety of people. Nowadays, open courseware (pioneered by the University of Thübingen Internet Multimedia Server, 1999, and popularized by the MIT Opencourseware, 2002) and massive open online courses (MOOCs, popularized by Coursera and EDx, 2012) are as common as social networks (pioneered by Facebook, 2004). Their quality is often measured just from the number of users logged in and the a priori high standards of backing universities. Is it enough to count number of users to mark the actual quality of open courses teachinglearning models? Why not quality assessment (QA) of actual contents and skills taught learned?

In this contribution we take MOOCs as a metamodel of teaching-learning collaboration and propose a peer reviewed-based QA framework from the point of view of university teachers, focused on contents, skills and organization. Peer reviewed quality assurance (PeRQA), like peer assessment in MOOCs, ensures quality of the courses and provides feedback. QA must be done by teachers of related subjects. PeRQA is affordable and free of the administrative overburden of qualification agencies, demands transparency and treasures excellence in each field.

It is in the foundations of European culture that market alone must not rule important issues like education or health care. Moreover, transparency is a demand in modern open societies.

We believe European DTU Open Learning community must adopt PeRQA to lead again high quality online distance teaching. Our proposal pursues this goal.

Keywords

MOOC · open learning · peer reviewed quality assurance · quality assessment