QUALITY ASSURANCE OF USER GENERATED CONTENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION

User generated content (UGC) poses a number of challenges to the current understanding of education and its institutions, very much due to its success. Web2.0 and the corresponding tools enable learners to develop and publish learning content independently from experts' knowledge and institutional frameworks. This development leads to questions like "Is the traditional concept of “authority” an appropriate one at universities?" and to suggestions like "the “ivory tower” of higher education should be opened to the wider world". Knowledge management becomes even more fundamental in this context than in the past. Moreover, the rapidly growing number of learning resources generated by users makes the issue of quality a pressing one. The CONCEDE (CONtent Creation Excellence through Dialogue in Education) project intends to address such issues.

The overall aim of CONCEDE is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by enhancing the quantity and quality of user generated content that can be incorporated into higher education learning provision.
The specific objectives are:
• to investigate the state of the art of actors, projects and practices in relation to quality of user generated content, with specific regards to higher education
• Developing a holistic multi-layered quality framework of user generated content to be introduced effectively into higher education. Such framework is based on three layers: users’ comments, reviews and ratings, institutional quality procedures, as well as dialogue and negotiations among the representatives of these two levels in order to reach a consensus
• Test the acceptance and the effectiveness of this mechanism into higher education pilot experiences involving primarily teachers and learners and foster cross-fertilisation of experiences
• Create a platform for dialogue for all those aiming at promoting UGC in education through national policy panels as well as dissemination and valorisation activities, aiming to facilitate networking and collaboration among existing initiatives into universities, European and international projects along with a significant effort to involve international agencies, as well as organisations dealing with quality assurance.

Preliminary results from desk research and stakeholder questionnaires will lead to the presentation of the current situation in Europe concerning the incorporation of UGR in tertiary education.