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Dimensions of quality, by Professor Graham Gibbs, sets out to identify those factors that give a reliable indication of the quality of student learning.

"Politicians who want to improve the quality of teaching through increased competition may ironically simply end up with ever greater systems of centralised control. Following Hayek (the philosopher father of free market economics), I would say this is not the way to make the best of our teachers."

Dr Stephen Jackson, Director of Reviews at QAA, sets out his views on the importance of measuring and rewarding quality teaching and discusses how higher education institutions are managing to do this

"Over the past year, MOOCs have opened the doors of access to quality education, and have captured the attention of educational leaders and students worldwide. Today, we're excited to announce the next step in our mission to foster student learning without limits and expand the possibilities that MOOCs and online education can enable."

RubiStar is a free tool to help teachers create quality rubrics.

A new investor-backed company, Quad Learning, is teaming up with community colleges to build a national network of honors programs with a collaborative curriculum that they envision giving students an affordable, high-quality associate degree and helping them transfer to topnotch colleges and universities.

Facilitating the provision of detailed, deep and useful feedback is an important design feature of any educational programme. Here we evaluate feedback provided to medical students completing short transferable skills projects. Feedback quantity and depth were evaluated before and after a simple intervention to change the structure of the feedback-provision form from a blank free-text feedback form to a structured proforma that asked a pair of short questions for each of the six domains being assessed. Each pair of questions consisted of asking the marker 'what was done well?' and 'what changes would improve the assignment?' Changing the form was associated with a significant increase in the quantity of the feedback and in the amount and quality of feedback provided to students. We also observed that, for these double-marked projects, the marker designated as 'marker 1' consistently wrote more feedback than the marker designated 'marker 2'.

I asked for suggestions for a replacement for Netskills TONIC and Chris Hall (@chris_hall) passed on this recommendation from one of his students: BBC WebWise. This is a beginner's course aimed at adults who are new to computers and the internet. It has a very wide brief which seems to be the closest to TONIC in it's range of topics. Very high-quality resources as well as you'd expect from the BBC. Although not a direct replacement, WebWise was the best alternative that I have come across so far, and is the one I will be using with my EG-152 class this year (I will be linking to the Internet Detective and OU Safari too).

Bucky Roberts (thenewboston.com) introduces the HTML5 family of features and APIs in this YouTube playlist of 53 (so far) 4-5 minute tutorials. As Bucky Says, HTML5 is an evolution of the "HTML Burrito" of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and he has earlier video courses on these as well. I've only watched two episodes, but they seem good quality to me. Thanks to mrparkin for the recommendation.

"The key opportunity for institutions is to take the concepts developed by the MOOC experiment to date and use them to improve the quality of their face-to-face and online provision, and to open up access to higher education. Most importantly, the understanding gained should be used to inform diversification strategies including the development of new business models and pedagogic approaches that take full advantage of digital technologies."

"For the 2013 Conference in Orlando, we received nearly 50 full papers. From those 50, we selected a subset of the highest quality papers to publish. All articles went through a rigorous double-blind peer review and editing process. From the selected papers, we published two special issues - one IHR special issue and one JARHE special issue."

"The Technology Strategy Board and the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) are to invest up to £1.1m in exploratory studies into the design of technology-based products and services that will improve learning outcomes. This SBRI competition seeks to stimulate business performance in an already vibrant education technology sector by supporting high-quality design of commercially viable products and services that can be delivered at scale while being affordable and easy to use. See the competition brief"

"In Higher Education Focus Groups and Nominal Group Technique are two well-established methods for obtaining student feedback about their learning experience. These methods are regularly used for the enhancement and quality assurance. Based on small-scale research of educational developers' practice in curriculum development, this study presents the use of a combined approach that potentially offers more benefits than the use of Focus Groups alone. It proposes a combined method, 'Nominal Focus Group', which includes the benefits of in-depth discussion of a Focus Group and the prioritising of results of Nominal Group Technique. These benefits include questions for further exploration, initial data analysis and increased ownership of the process by students. In practice, the method gave rise to rich data and actionable outcomes that were used to make informed curriculum enhancements for the programme teams."

Mini-project and other HE funding schemes are highly competitive and new staff wishing to apply or staff who wish to improve their skills in writing or reviewing high quality proposals for educational projects are welcome to attend an on-line workshop (up

Once upon a time there lived a vain Emperor whose only worry in life was to impress his subjects with the extraordinary quality of his business presentations. He developed new slide shows almost every day and loved to show them off to his people

With this initiative, the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) are aiming to expand understanding of OER by educational decision makers and quality assurance experts in order to p

The aim of TEL research is to improve the quality of formal and informal learning, and to make accessible forms of knowledge that were simply inaccessible before.

Better quality than You Tube