Faceted Curriculum Project/Quality Control

Quality control is an important issue, given the following nature of the Faceted Curriculum Project:
 * 1) School districts and other agencies must be assured that the materials produced by the FCP are of high quality. Namely, the FCP must be competetive with established industry leaders in math education.
 * 2) The FCP is meant to be developed collaboratively, and distributed freely.

This page describes a methodology for the FCP to satisfy these requirements.

Qualifications
Unlike projects such as Wikipedia, the FCP is based on specialized page types, each to be developed by users with expertise, and with a specific audience in mind. Some pages will be written by mathematicians, some by educators, others by scientists and engineers. Some pages will be written with students as a desired audience, others with teachers as a desired audience, others with administrators as a desired audience.

Audience Specifications
Each page type, such as FCP Assessment Facet, will have a thorough description, including a description of the intended audience. In this way, authors will know their audience before writing such a page.

Author Qualifications
The Semantic Mediawiki package allows for the storage and access of relationships between pages. While this will be used throughout the FCP, to express relationships between mathematics content, viewpoints, and standards, this "semantic markup" will also be used to express relationships of qualification and trust between developers of the project.

Specifically, each page of content will be signed by an author, using the simple tag: Author::A User Name. Each user name will link to a user page (already implemented within Mediawiki), displaying information about the user.

Each user page will have a subpage, which contains the user's qualification levels. These will be given by semantic tags, such as Math Qualification::Math4, with the meaning that the user has reached "Math 4" level qualification in mathematics. Each level will be explicitly defined, using industry experience and educational background as guidelines.

Finally, to prevent the possibility of a user inventing his/her own qualifications, there will be a final semantic tag on the user's page, of the form Qualified by::A Administrator's Name. This indicates that a basic background check has been carried out by an administrator. Once such a user page has been created, it can be "protected", in such a way that it can only be altered by an administrator.

An administrator can use semantic query language, in order to ensure that his/her name is not being used without permission on the website.

In this way, the project can ensure that author's have sufficient qualifications to develop content.