Quality of resources is a key factor in ETB. Guidelines on quality processes and recommendations were developed for (1) teachers and (2) repository managers.
The first set of recommendations aims at teachers working in the educational settings using web-based material. Process: the recommendations deal with aspects educators must keep in mind while creating the content of their own material:
- Accuracy: the resource must be reliable, valid and produced by a Trusted source; information should be impartially presented; resource must not contain biases, mistakes or omissions.
- Appropriateness: the resource should contain information for the intended learners' level; the resource should use an appropriate and suitable vocabulary, language or concepts, avoid mistakes or stereotyping.
- Clarity: information should provide a clear tie between the purpose (goals, objectives) and the content and procedures suggested. Correlation should be comprehensive and obvious. Redundancy is usually unwelcome and isolated activities without a relationship are superfluous.
- Completeness: the resource should be complete, i.e., offer all essential information and elements, as well as inclusion of such components as self-contained activities, materials required, prerequisites, information for obtaining related resources, assessment criteria, links to quality indicators and standards.
- Motivation: the resource should achieve the active engagement of the learner and be interesting, innovative and appealing, build on prior knowledge and skills, and promote relevant action on the part of the learner.
- Organisation: the resource should be easy to use and logically sequenced, with each segment of the resource related to other segments. It should flow in an orderly manner, using organising tools (i.e. headings, a map, etc.); it should provide references, bibliographies and other supporting materials.
The second set of recommendations is for repository owners: managers, curators and/or administrators of an educational server. This group is strictly responsible for submitting and administrating the metadata records circulating on the network. The recommendations deal with issues that matter for the network; i.e. what kind of material is wanted for the ETB-network.
Every joining repository carries out documentation processing (source selection, documentary processing, information processing and diffusion) in relation to its target users whose needs have been analysed.
Factors of Quality
ETB aims to represent a European documentation system, where the actors use documentary standards (metadata), selection criteria and quality assurance procedures that are common to the system and established in advance.
Submission of records is based on the policy that all the records have to pass a local quality assessment before being submitted to the network. This allows ETB to state that a repository becoming a member of the ETB-network already indicates that resources are of a good quality.
Secondly, the repositories shall make their quality assurance policy and quality assessment procedures available for everybody on the Web. This allows users to evaluate whether the quality assessment policy of resources meets their demands whilst assure them about the material found through the ETB. These two requirements create the base principal for "Trusted sources" in the ETB-network.
ETB judges four (4) factors valuable for quality assurance of the learning resources that are submitted to the network. These factors are Trusted Source (as explained above), Usefulness, Attractiveness and Satisfaction. These four factors of quality of material are top-level terms containing several sub-factors.
Usefulness, for example, is linked to the "Information quality" and "Learning capability" what kind of skills learner gets from using the material. Since each learning situation is different it is impossible to define one set of quality standards that will fulfil all the needs of end users. Naturally, if all the elements of the ETB data model are used (look at http://www.en.eun.org/eun.org2/goto.cfm?did=5874 ), the information of the material is more complete and more informative, hence of higher quality.
This emphasises the factor Satisfaction too. ETB believes that if the end user is provided with enough information of the resource s/he will be able to decide whether a piece of material in concern meets the standards s/he has in mind. Thus, the overall satisfaction to the material, and also to the documentation system, will be enhanced. The factor for attractiveness of resources might sound pretentious and outplace in the list of factors judged valuable. But the playfulness and attractiveness is not to neglect, after all it is an important asset of using ICT in the educational setting. ETB promotes explorative, innovative and enjoyable learning material that can make educational setting appealing and attractive to its audience.