Analysis of the impact of subsidies on child care fees in Missouri found that child care markets are competitive. Growth in subsidies form 1991-93 increased fees but also improved quality. (SK)

Anecdotal evidence about Web site effectiveness can be colorful but is not useful in structuring and managing a site. This article examines elements of Web quality (identifying customers, articulating purpose, providing relevant content, creating coherent structure, crafting housestyle, providing relevant action points, delivering promises) and…

Discusses the quality of cataloging in bibliographic control based on experiences at the Library of Congress. Highlights include the down side of quality and quality review, copy cataloging, CONSER (Cooperative Online Serials), NCCP (National Coordinated Cataloging Program) and PCC (Program for Cooperative Cataloging), minimal-level cataloging,…

Explains the Open Directory Project (ODP), an attempt to catalog the World Wide Web by creating a human-compiled Web directory. Discusses the history of the project; open source models; the use of volunteer editors; quality control; problems and complaints; and use of ODP data by commercial services such as Google. (LRW)

Discusses the legacy of Toronto Canada's North York Board of Education's commitment to design quality, embodied in a series of schools from the 1990s. Several school designs, photographs, and floor plans are included, illustrating the Board's desire to combine durability and user satisfaction by embracing architectural quality. (GR)

This document discusses the importance of data-quality and presents three simple steps that can help lay the framework for an over all data-quality strategy. The first step is to ask some rather simple questions, such as: (1) How much data does the organization have, how fast is it creating new data, and how many redundant copies are there?; and…

Since the 1980s, dozens of Chinese government documents on teacher education reform have been published. These documents have influenced the direction of teacher education change in China and will continue to do so in the years ahead. The first wave of documents focused on recovering the teacher education system. A second wave centered on building…

The Mississippi Consortium for International Development's (MCID's) intervention involved the development, publication and distribution of an Integrated Foundations of Learning Kit, focused on numeracy. This intervention was aligned with Zambia's priorities and strategies and matched the requirements of the Textbooks and Learning Materials Program…

The fundamental concepts of Achieving the Dream--using evidence to develop and evaluate strategies for improving student learning and success--are also important to successful efforts to meet accreditation requirements. Following the Achieving the Dream approach can help community colleges organize and document improvement efforts in ways that are…

Purpose: Student evaluation of teaching (SET) questionnaires are used in many countries, although much current research questions the validity of these surveys. US research indicates that more than 90 percent of academic accounting departments use this performance measurement. This paper aims to focus on the validity of SET data.…

The main scientific problems investigated in this article deal with technical evaluation of quality attributes of the main components of e-Learning systems (referred here as DLEs--Digital Libraries of Educational Resources and Services), i.e., Learning Objects (LOs) and Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). The main research object of the work is…

The role and function of external quality assurance is of great importance for the development of an internal quality culture in higher education. Research has shown that external quality assurance can stimulate but also create obstacles for institutional improvement. To strike a balance between improvement and accountability is, therefore, a key…

This study applies the "Personnel Evaluation Standards" of the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation to the procedures, practices, and related components of a school's staff evaluation program to determine the program's effectiveness. Evaluators sought answers to questions including the extent to which the intended structures and…

An all-volunteer organization called the Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS), headquartered in Taiwan, was initially designed to translate open source materials from MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) site into Chinese. Given the recent plethora of open educational resources (OER), such as the OCW, the growing use of such resources by the…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to provide insights into the processes that can be and have been adopted by UK business schools as they attempt to meet the Quality Assurance Agency's concern with the standard of quality management and enhancement. Design/methodology/approach: A review of the literature provides interpretations of quality,…