Trust in Capacity Building Material

This learning resource is about trust in the capacity building material in Wikiversity itself. At the one hand public authoring and checking of community-driven content is appreciate value that the Wikipedia /Wikiversity community does not want to sacrifice for more strict quality assurance model, because that might exclude community members from contributing to a learning resource. On the other hand capacity building e.g. in area Risk Management needs quality assurance, so that the learning resource for risk mitigation strategies are based scientific results e.g. published by WHO. To combine freedom for authoring (tailor material to local or regional requirements and constraints) and quality assurance by trusted organizations is an incredibly challenging step. Even if the wiki community is very fast in correcting huge levels of digital disruption, a fallback option to quality assured capacity building material for potential users/teachers of the capacity building material can be a desired option. As a result of the political and financial crises of recent years also the public trust[1] in digital media is reduced.

Trust in People and Organisation

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Wikiversity community cannot suggest to trust in a certain group of authors, a organization and a company that provides capacity building material. Trust is build by individual experience with an author, a certain group of authors, a organization or institutions.

If users responded to the digital threat by different strategies:

  • compare a quality assured capacity building material (e.g. provided by WHO) with Wikiversity content.
  • authors link their content development (e.g. Wikiversity) with one or more quality assured versions with the concept of Public-Private-Versioning. Please keep in mind that there might exist more than one qualitiy assured versions that state scientific results that are in contradiction to eachother, depending on
    • who quality assured the results and
    • who funded the scientific results and/or the educational resources build on the scientific results.
  • check scientific evidence and rationals for the learning resource and add theses resources to the Wikiversity content.
  • improve the current content in Wikiversity according to your expertise and create a version/snapshot of current Wikiversity Learning resource and publish that content in public repository with a read access for all and a write access for the group of authors responsible to quality assured version (e.g. GitHub or web portal of an organisation). New releases in Wikiversity can pass the quality assurance process by the group of authors and the improvement by the Wikiversity community will be refered to in the new release in private repository.

Learning Task

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  • (State of the Art in Science) From the educational perspective it is important, that teachers and learners are able to make a judgements about cited scientific results the learning resource is build on. It includes the identification of the "state of the art" in sciences about the topic, so that the teachers are able to create of survey of what is published about the topic of the learning resource and in terms of conflicting results always ask the question, "who published when what as foundation for the capacity building material?" (focus of the research),
  • (Conflict of Interest) Are there possible conflicts of interest and what are possible causes or the inconsistent scientific results (differences in the experimental design)? Discuss the design of the learning resource and possible consequences for the capacity building material if the scientific results need more research?
  • (Science and Evolution of Knowledge) Science is an evolutionary process and a constant struggle of gaining results. In health related research capacity building is performed e.g. for public health risk mitigation. Explore the challenges for COVID-19 e.g. for supporting society and apply epidemiological risk mitigation and instutional capacity building.

See also

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References

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  1. An attack on science? Media use, trust in scientists, and perceptions of global warming Jay D. Hmielowski, Lauren Feldman, Teresa A. Myers, Anthony Leiserowitz, Edward Maibach Public Understanding of Science Vol 23, Issue 7, pp. 866 - 883 First published date: April-03-2013 10.1177/0963662513480091