Learning Tech 16 (English introduction)

The theme and title of this issue of Learning Tech is Didactic Quality and the Qualification of Teaching Materials and Technology

Preface

There are many ideas about what constitutes quality in teaching. It is widely and extensively discussed. When examining teaching quality, one can adopt different perspectives. One might focus on how participants in a teaching situation experience and perceive its immediate quality. Another perspective is to investigate the qualities that were intended in advance—those embedded in the planning and design of the teaching. A third possibility is to focus on the assessment and evaluation of teaching quality based on specifically defined quality criteria or standards. These are merely three ways of approaching the study of teaching quality.

Teaching materials and technologies are part of every teaching practice. They contribute to shaping and qualifying the teaching, but in order to enhance teaching quality, they themselves must be of high quality. Teaching materials and technologies can possess varying degrees of didactic quality—a quality inherent in their design, which is expected to have an effect in teaching. They may also have a quality that emerges only through their actual use in practice, which may differ from what was initially expected. This can lead to a need to further qualify the materials and technologies based on new insights and experiences. Sometimes, one may even be positively surprised when the quality turns out to be higher than anticipated. Qualification, in this sense, is the process of striving toward a particular standard of quality.

The theme of this issue of Learning Tech is didactic quality and the qualification of teaching materials and technologies. In the following, we briefly introduce the articles that offer different perspectives on how researchers and educators can work with these very questions.