[Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

Wed May 11 04:46:26 UTC 2005

Tim-

> Wikiversity is a vastly larger and more ambitious project than anything
> launched before by Wikimedia.

I considered writing a similar statement earlier in the thread, but then 
I reflected upon it and was no longer sure it's true. Wikinews in 
particular is probably similarly ambitious if you consider the stated 
long term goal to become an alternative to established news agencies and 
to build a global network of citizen journalists. However, Wikisophia 
can certainly be defined in a way to match or exceed Wikinews in its 
ambitions.

> You have no incentive scheme for teachers
> besides monetary. You're a bunch of 20-something year old dreamers who
> happened to be in the right place at the right time, and you expect
> large organisations to give you grants? 

The World Bank grant application is something tangible for which we are 
partnering with other eLearning projects. The key question here is how 
the project is going to be framed. Again, the name "Wikiversity" hurts 
more than it helps. If you are going to a large international 
institution, and you point them to Wikipedia and say you'd like to build 
an eLearning project using similar principles, your chances are not too 
bad that they will listen. If you say that you want to create a "wiki 
university", your chances are not too bad that they will laugh at you.

> Perhaps we have an advantage in
> that the rest of the world hasn't yet cottoned on to the fact that the
> people running Wikipedia were just lucky to discover a good idea early
> and enthusiastically jump on the bandwagon, and that the whole thing has
> been pulled off with near-zero managerial expertise or effort. They will
> cotton on, possibly after a failure or two.

Jimbo often insists that Wikipedia is first and foremost an 
encyclopedia, not a community, but sometimes it is important to remember 
that it is both. We are talking about thousands of volunteers motivated 
by a desire to share knowledge, innovating every single day in the ways 
this knowledge is structured, presented and distributed. This community, 
if it could be bought, would be worth billions of dollars. And it is 
growing every day.

"They" don't have this community, and they will have difficulties 
building it. "They", if we're talking about companies, are strictly 
hierarchically organized, proprietary to the extreme, and driven purely 
by profit. No, with very few exceptions, I'm not worried about the 
establishment catching up with us. I predict that the strongest 
competitors we will face in the coming years and decades will come from 
our own ranks and from the open source community.

> No-one here has experience with running a university. As far as I know,
> none of the people involved in this project have even taught at the
> tertiary level.

Careful, the Wikimedia community is a more colorful bunch than you may 
realize :-). I have personally been an outside lecturer on sexology at a 
German university.

> Of course there are people willing to teach for free, but they are
> greatly outnumbered by the people who want to learn for free.

Probably, but you are missing one of the key points of eLearning, which 
is to greatly reduce the time investment required by the teacher. Jimbo 
is currently learning German using various resources, such as flash 
cards and audio records. Wikisophia could provide similar resources and 
online courses which require no continued teacher participation. Some of 
this material would be appropriate on Wikibooks, some would not; 
importantly, Wikisophia would also index resources outside our current 
projects.

As for the teaching time, we can prioritize: People in developing 
countries, for example, could receive preferential treatment for 
distance teaching.

Again, if we use a name like Wikiversity, we set an expectation that 
there will be "professors" lecturing eloquently about certain subjects, 
which is of course not very feasible for the reasons you cite.

> In short, there's no way to obtain an acceptable student-teacher 
 > ratio without paying teachers, and to pay teachers you need an
 > administrative structure and managerial expertise.

I'm all for it, but these are long term goals. In the short term, 
Wikisophia can be useful as a repository and index of educational 
resources, with some careful dabbling in teacher/student interaction, 
certification and original research.

Erik