Best Practices database

- access to the Database -

- documentation -

What is it?

A best practice can be defined as a technique or methodology that leads to a desired result. Best practice holds the means to do things the best way. Best practices can be strategies, activities, or approaches that lead to achieving objectives and goals. Best practice can be found through research, experience or evaluation. The term best practice is an established term, used in various situations, even sometimes in circumstances where one cannot be sure that there is no better practice to be found. “Good practice” and “lesson learned” are the terms used, alongside with best practice, to indicate the best practice especially in certain situation.

When best practices are implemented, contextual issues should be taken into account. What was the context in which this practice was identified as a best practice? Were there aspects in that context that may have promoted success? In implementation context, are there blocking factors that may affect the outcome? In this contextual sense best practises can be seen as efficient solutions to a problem encountered or improvements in the state of affairs in e-learning caused by a different way of doing things. The practise must have been implemented and positively evaluated, demonstrating an effective mean of satisfying the users' need, based on explicit quality indicators. The users may be a student, a trainer, a tutor, or any stakeholders.

How to describe it?

To be useful, a best practice must be described in a way that allows an external reader to understand the context and the conditions of its implementation. The user also needs to receive advices on how to implement the best practice, the needed resources, the identification of problems that can happened, how they can be solved, and what advantages are gained for the different users. By advantages we mean an effective improvement or an effective solution to a problem widely encountered in e-learning. The users must be able to anticipate a difficulty concerning a specific situation that may appear when implementing the “best practice”. For each difficulty at least one solution must be available. On the basis of these determinations, the practises are described in the database according to the title, keywords, content, actor's roles, performed activities, sub-process the practice belongs to, the problems solved, difficulties encountered and resources required.

How to find it?

The best practises database can be retrieved with the help of keywords and full text searches. Additionally, to help the user in finding relevant best practises the database utilises lists of roles and activities determined by the e-Quality project. Roles, like material designer, coordinator, teacher or tutor, enable the user to elicit information on the specific roles he or she plays in his work or which he/ she is interested in. Activities, like pedagogical planning, material design or familiarization offer the user a way to delimit the areas of action to the most essential ones for the searched best practises.

Best practises are not stable or fixed forever methods, solutions or arrangements. The reason for this is as well the changes in higher education institutions as the development of information technology used in ODL. This is why the best practises database also allows commentaries on the practices by the users of the database. In this way, we hope, the project gives space to the evolution of best practises in face of novelties in the field of higher education and ODL