Abstract:

Various attitudes to the problem of online educational content quality resulted in numerous attempts to general measures or indexes of quality within online learning. In our paper we will point out one of the main axes along which the discussion of quality assurance in online learning takes place. We are studying the consequences of taking two opposite standpoints towards educational online content production. First of them is based on cognitivism, and therefore underlines the importance of placing given portion of knowledge in the overall, highly regulated system of education, which includes educational methodology, learning effects, skills and learning management systems. Second approach, which we traditionally call constructivist, is connected with individual choice of learning outcomes, personal learning environment (PLE), horizontal communication between learners (including peer-learning and peer- assessment) or even inverted learning (like in flipped classes).

We observe that the preference of selected approach results in different ‘styles’ of educational content quality assurance. Moreover, constructivists and cognitivists in online learning differ in defining the measure of quality for learning content. Hypothetic two opposite indexes of educational content quality (cognitive vs constructivist quality indexes) are consistent with the fundamental philosophy underlying the two. But, as we want to prove, there is still room for elimination of this discrepancy. In a number of case studies we will show possible ways of bringing together two fundamentally inconsistent attitudes to the online learning content quality measures.

Keywords:

Online educational content, learning content, content production, cognitive approach, constructive approach.