[L’n’ T]

I’m reading An investigation of the development and adoption of educational metadata standards for the widespread use of learning objects by Greig Krull (available here). On page 85 he is talking about qualitative information about learning objects, and says MERLOT has been using an academic peer review model for that. He goes on to say that

…this model is restrictive in that the process of creating qualitative information is limited to how quickly experts can evaluate new resources

A few lines below he adds anyone should be able to rate learning objects. Is that true? Can that problem be avoided? Is any user’s opinion equally valid? Should the author’s rating, any user’s rating, an expert’s or blind peer review rating taken into account with the same privilege? I am a believer in the ‘wisdom of crowds’ concept, but I think that some experimentation should be done on measuring that wisdom before allowing something like that to happen.