 Hello again to another short video about the benefits of digitization in teaching and learning. Let me start with a question addressed to the teachers among you. How did you compile the content of a learning unit as part of one of your classes in the pre-digital age? I assume your role was that of a remixer. You most likely first went to the library and selected some books and papers that you considered to be relevant for the topic. From these sources you compiled the content. And perhaps you also prepared additional materials such as handouts, slides, data sheets and so on. This combination of the sources you selected then became the backbone of your unit. And what about the quality of the content? Well the responsibility for the quality of the stuff you were going to teach lay solely in your hands. Did anyone cross-check your material? Did anyone peer-review what you considered to be adequate? Were the colleagues sitting in your class while you delivered your content? All these questions must be answered with a distinct no. You were the only one who assured the quality of the content. The only exception were cases where you used a single peer-reviewed textbook as the backbone of your teaching but even peer-reviewing can be problematic. Let me tell you a true story. Recently I submitted the same paper to two different conferences for peer-reviewing. The groups of referees of one conference rejected the paper for what they called reasons of scientific outdatedness and the other group of referees was thrilled by its accuracy in today's relevance and accepted the paper. So even traditional paper-based peer-reviewing can be seen as problematic to a certain extent. And what about the students? Couldn't they assure the quality of content? Well all they could do was ask questions in class about what you wrote on the board. I remember questions such as isn't Onomatopoeia spelled with four vowels at the end when I had written it down with just three on the board? Well this happened and maybe some of them even found that you misinterpreted the literature and yet others consulted you after class in order to ask questions about the content. But all that was the exception rather than the rule. So true content quality assurance did not really exist. The only one responsible for the content was the teacher himself. With digital teaching and learning materials this situation has changed. Let's assume that the material that you compile for your classes is now digital and that's available to a much wider community. Even if you protect the material and put it on platforms where only a handful of people have access the material is now more sustainable and not as short lived as in traditional scenarios. And the community can now add comments. They either send you emails or they comment directly using forum or network options. They mention typos, they point out inaccuracy and make suggestions. And of course in educational videos they can also see how you deliver the content. Here are some comments where the community found inaccuracy in our videos in our multimedia learning units. I put Jackson into Missouri rather than Mississippi. I assigned the feature plus labial to global fricatives instead of minus labial. I misspelled tercet with final double T. I wrongly said that Shakespeare died in 1618 and I misspelled further words. These things happen, they have always happened. Or look at these examples of suggestions about the content where some viewers, shouldn't I call them brief viewers now, pointed out interesting aspects concerning the respective topics. Very useful indeed. And there is also another aspect. In a traditional teaching scenario I almost never received any comments about my teaching style. Sure, students applaud it at the end. But irrespective of the quality they always do that for reasons of politeness. This is totally different in digital scenarios, especially in educational videos where the ways of content delivery can now freely and anonymously be judged and politeness is no longer a factor. Fortunately the judgments we receive are very much positive. And this means for me as a teacher a high degree of motivation, something I have rarely experienced in traditional scenarios. The thing is, once digitized and made available, the content becomes visible and transparent to all those who can access the data. In our case to the whole world. Admittedly a much larger group than the handful of students who could judge our data in the past. I'm not saying that quality assurance today is no longer a problem at all. But what I'm saying is that it is now on a different level. The content on the Virtual Linguistics Campus, our global e-learning platform, can now be seen by the thousands of users who are part of the VLC community. That is students who take our courses and teachers from other universities who use and offer our courses at their institution in their name. And our educational videos in our YouTube channel can be judged by several millions of reviewers. Yes, for me they're not just viewers but they're always reviewers too. And their comments lead to a permanent improvement of our material. We revise and produce videos. For example, this video here about communication where our viewers had pointed out that we should add a chapter on sign language. Here it is. So we recently added that chapter and uploaded a new version of that video. We add comments. We change multimedia arrangements. We correct typos and so on. Quality assurance has now a new... Well, what should I say? It has a new quality. In summary, for me the new openness and transparency of our material is a new level of quality assurance in the 21st century. This is a huge advantage for me because concerning the content I deliver I now feel more on the safe side than ever before. I'm sure that among the millions of viewers of our videos and the thousands of users of our courses there have been several academics that fully appreciate our material otherwise they would have complained or they would have had at least a chance to do so. So quality assurance in the digital age is not just a benefit for me as a teacher whose content has become more reliable than ever before but it is also a big advantage for those who actually use the material. So I hope you can subscribe to what I've said as far as quality management is concerned and I thank you very much for your attention.