It seems that EFQUEL has received increasing attention since April 2009 when you started your work with the Foundation. What influence have you had in this process?


Rolf Reinhardt: Since 2005, EFQUEL has been a very important organization that brings together universities, corporations, and other networks in the field of quality and eLearning. The progress that you've mentioned was already there before I entered, and I feel honored to be working for the biggest network for quality in eLearning worldwide.


Due to the work of my colleagues like our president Claudio Dondi and our vice president Ulf-Daniel Ehlers, many important organizations had already become members. That was an excellent base on which to start. My influence has primarily been in the dissemination of this success story. First of all, I built up a new website and developed an online marketing strategy in close corporation with our Board of Directors.


Then, I started to create more benefits for our members, like a secure area on the website where you can find interesting documents and much more. Since taking over the work of our membership officer, who left in June, I have also begun to get in touch personally with hundreds of people from our network. At times this was a very impressive opportunity since I had become familiar with some of them previously through reading their books.


EFQUEL describes its mission with the words "inclusiveness and dialogue". What does this mean exactly?


Rolf Reinhardt: There are different approaches to quality. In October last year, I was in Berlin at a workshop of the German Institute for Standardization (DIN), where we developed a new competence model in order to create a new ISO norm. What we came up with in the end was a process through which we attempted to establish some standards. For sure, standards are very important for screws, electricity plugs, etc., but in the field of learning, I prefer to have an open system.


I consider the way EFQUEL defines quality as being rather close to the definition used by quality management systems like TQM or EFQM, which in my opinion are based on inclusiveness and dialogue - within a certain structure. You can also find this approach in our quality certification scheme for higher education, UNIQUe. Our objective is an open discussion among the stakeholders in the quality process.


In our field, I find it absolutely necessary to involve people and bring them together with other specialists from all over the world. EFQUEL offers very fertile soil for this since - over the last few months - we have extended our European network to include the Middle East, Russia, and most recently Taiwan, where Ulf signed a Memorandum of Understanding at the beginning of September. Therefore it is really worthwhile to become a member and to engage actively in the dynamic dialogue about quality in eLearning.