Talk:Wikiversity

This page is for discussion of Wiki-based university-like projects under the currently adopted name Wikiversity. (there is also: Talk:Wikiversity:About and Talk:Wikiversity at wikibooks)

See /Old and /Archive for previous, brief discussions of the project and its name.

Summary of Ideas

Things the Wikiversity could feature

Interactivity

Online chat between students
Online and offline study groups
"Lecture theater"
Research of interesting things
virtual microscope for a course oceanography
Assessmnet Tools (ie. question banks that can be pulled randomly)
Flash Cards (with heuristic presentation, ie. they would be cumulative and present incorrectly answered cards more often.

Teaching Resources

Powerpoint/slides collection

Well, if you want Wikiversity to be a Free learning/teaching enviroment/wiki/system/waddever, I really think you should try to keep it multi-platform and free/open source software, so I'd suggest OpenOffice or something. --Dawa, 02/02 6:42 GMT+1

PDF is even better for viewing, while still keeping the source in wiki format. --Pgan002

Teachers often exchange stuff like this, so we should be open for any format, but encourage open formats. --WiseWoman 12:14, 2 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Do you know this Web-standards oriented slide system: http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ I am quiet sure this would suit the need for slides for a web-based university... About license, here is a quotation from the site: "S5 as of version 1.1 is explicitly in the Public Domain, so it's really out there for anyone who wants it." - Cybertooth 16:37, 3 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Lesson plans, activities

We added startup pages for two demonstration courses: Meeresbiologie and Biologie der Antarktis with some interactive activites and some full publications, which we moved to wikisource (with permission of the ediors) Kils 18:18, 27 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Books via Wikibooks
Links to usable materials that cannot be incorporated in the Wikiversity

Visions

Hi, I'll guess I'll kick this off... If Wikibooks goes down the Wikiversity line, then there needs to be some expansion. Wikibooks are fine for the actual textbooks to go along with a course, but essentially, what WikiU needs is some kind of capability (simple, nothing too complicated) for conducting online teaching. Perhaps instead of Discuss this page, there can be Questions about the material? And we could have some kind of Lecture theatre section, for textbook material split up and taught in the Lecture method style?

If you want something like that, take a look at a few e-learning enviroments, like whiteboard.sf.net and see the wikipedia entry for E-learning for more info - stuff like that ought to do the trick. --Dawa, 02/02 6:42 GMT+1

The Wikiversity line is definitely a positive road to go down. Free education! However there needs to be some heavy restructuring of Wikibooks as it is for it to become WikiU. Maybe WikiU needs a seperate site? (Though I don't know how economically feasible this will be.)

Anyway, my 2 cents. Dysprosia 10:42, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I think IRC chatrooms would be well-suited for a lecture, as well as just for a student and teacher to have a tutor-like session. LittleDan 18:32, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)

From Wikibooks' Staff lounge:

I know that the name "Wikibooks" was thought of and promoted by me, but that was before we really knew where we wanted to go with this project (become an educational resource). The word "Wikipedia" is obviously the name of an encyclopedia and the word "Wiktionary" is obviously the name of a dictionary. But "Wikibooks" doesn't bring anything specific in mind. So what does everybody think of the name "WikiUniversity"? Our aim is to create a huge educational resource and I think that such a name would be more fitting to such an endeavor. --mav 02:15, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I like the name but would save it for a future vision. A University needs a library and a book store. I tend to see Wikibooks in this role. I would express two hopes now. First, that there is enough interest in this subject to soon require irts own discussion forum. Second, that we continue to build at least some experience with Wikibooks without the distraction of that discussion.

I think WikiU would need books and more. The whole question of interactive learning, distance learning, computer based instruction, and programmed instruction is much bigger than Wikibooks. IMHO it also needs more software than simple page displays with embedded links. We need to introduce pop-ups and the collapsable note windows currently under discission. We need alternative path routing based on test results, and an easy way to built these in a collaborative environment.

Belive me, I'm in favor of the idea. But I'd like to reserve the WikiUniversity name for that kind of a broader project, and I think we need a track record here before diluting resources. Its worth thinking about, and talking about. But I don't feel ready to jump in just yet.

Any other opinions? :-)...LouI 04:29, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Catchy. Why not WikiUni instead of University -- catchier? Anyway, I'm impartial to the whole thing (we could have non-Uni graded books here maybe?), though I could imagine selling WIKIU sweaters in that famous blocky-style print... ;) Dysprosia 05:55, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)

WikiLib...? :P -- Emperorbma 07:08, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)

As in the Wiki Liberation Movement? Eclecticology

I hear you. So Wikibooks would be the bookstore of WikiU? Now that is cool! Better name suggestion from Stanford Forte; Wikiversity. Granted it could be construed as Wiki+Adversity, but I kinda like double meanings. --mav

I like that name, and the idea that wikibooks could just be wikiversity's book place (I don't like calling it a store, though). It would be nice to have wikiversity.org and books.wikiversity.org. But I don't know how the actual teaching would go on at the main wikiversity.org. Would it be automated? We could have extentions to the wikitext format to make javascript quizzes. Teaching could go on by talk-style (except in the main article namespace, in this case). LittleDan 00:50, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)

No need for books.wikiversity.org since we already have wikibooks.org. We should talk about and develop m:Wikiversity on meta. I'll move all discussion there in a few days. --mav

I kicked the discussion off with some ideas :) Dysprosia 10:45, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)

'WikiVersity' sounds good to me. How about reserving "u:" for the shorthand interwiki symbol? Jrv 20:23, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Aside from domain name issues (I know you want to grab fast, Mav :), what exactly is WikiU supposed to cover? Eloquence 15:53, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Tools for instructors to use to make lesson plans, activities and, of course, have dialogs with their students (and student to student interaction). Also look at LouI's response above and the thread talking about "WikiClassroom" at the top of this page. --mav 21:08, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I'm all for a Wikiversity, and that name provisionally is as good as any. At the same time I see the task of making this work as far more challenging and difficult than writing an encyclopedia. When we talk about libraries, bookstores, instructors, lectures, seminars and so many other concepts related to the typical modern university we are already attaching preconceptions to what Wikiversity might be. We are unjustifiably leaping ahead to some imaginary point in the future that depends on history that has not been written yet.

Rochdale was a great idea while it was still housed in the smaller residences of the co-op movement. This system of houses had been built up over an extended period of time through sound fiscal management. When suddenly it found itself the owner of an 18 storey building, the product of the clever financial manipulations of (now York University professor) Howard Adelman it had to make an impossible reconciliation between the return on capital that had been promised to the banks, and the "free" education that had been promised to its prospective students. From that point on it was bound to fail. The infamy that it gained as an 18 storey pot-smoking hippy haven was a by-product of this doomed planning. The one positive thing that one could always say about the 6th floor drug-dealers' co-operative fortress was that they had no problem paying their rent.

I believe as much now in the principle of open and de-institutionalized education as I did during the campus activist times of the 1960s, but perhaps age makes me more cautious. If we are going to grow a Wikiversity, we're going to have to give a serious look at the nature and purpose of education. When Rochdale was flourishing today's technological communications resources did not yet exist; they simply represent one more major factor to take into consideration. These tools permit us to question even more seriously and more effectively what we questioned 40 years ago.

I see the modern university as approaching a new era of identity crisis. What are they for? There is a fundamental conflict between the idea of a university as the source of original thought which doesn't pay much money, and as a training centre for elites that put a priority on their ability to earn a high salary in the future. What is the role of a Wikiversity built on Wikipedia's philosophical success in that kind of environment? Eclecticology 19:54, 3 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Will The Wikiversity offer free degrees? If not than is it really a university?

Official degrees? No. There's no way Wikiversity could become accredited. Unofficial degrees? Maybe. Is it really a university? See my 'major point to resolve' below. --Spikey 22:08, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

No, and that is not the point. But teachers at accredited institutions can use material here to make their instruction better. And people who want to learn for the sake of learning can gather some insight here as well. It is entirely possible, that eLearning materials land here that are so advanced, that working through them would bring credit - and in many schools, there is an "Independent Study" course to give credit for exactly that. We are currently working at my institution (in Germany) on this - we have provisional accreditation (some administrative trivia and, of course, financing still need sorted out) for a Master's program that demands 6 units of 5 credits apiece of Independent Study.

The student and teacher decide together which units will be completed, and how the grading will be worked out. So by the time we roll this out in 2007 I'd love to have some material in the Wikiversity :-)--WiseWoman 12:23, 2 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There's a major point to resolve before we can procede with most of this discussion: is Wikiversity to be a school (non-accredited, of course) where people come to go through courses as well as write and edit them, or is it a resource for teachers in accredited (and non-accredited) places of learning to draw upon in their own classes? This distiction is what will define th logical setup of the site. Are we targeting independent students who want a good, free education in some area, or teachers who want help with materials/lesson plans/resources for their courses? --Spikey 22:08, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I'm strongly in favor of Wikiversity being a teachers' resource and possibly a companion to the Wikibooks website. It would be too hard, as well as unrealistic, to go for a full school. Besides, I'd like to have a well-built way to have a forum for Wikibooks. Also, help with homework would be (extremely) useful. - Pingveno 00:21, 1 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Well, you don't need to make it a full school, but it does sound like a good idea to provide the resources for "teachers" to help "students", and for students to ask questions to people who know about the stuff they're learning about. Nothing like mandatory subjects, dedicated teachers, etc., but more like a place where people can come to learn stuff they're interested in and where people can use their knowledge to help and educate others.

Wikiversity as an organisational tool

Not everything has to be wiki! I envision the core content being very non-wiki, for example, Powerpoint slides (or FoilTex or whatever), visualisation applets, IRC meetups, etc. We can treat this stuff like image or sound files and use the rapid collaborativeness of wiki to build organisational structure: set up hierarchies (Calculus is a Math), keep links in good working order, schedule IRC meetups and so forth. See what I'm saying? Non-wiki for content, Wiki for structure. -- Kowey 21:05, 4 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Wikiquiz

This week I met a wikipedian who had an idea which could be useful for wikiversity: Wikiquiz. Essentially, it would be an extension of MediaWiki which allows for the creation of multiple choice tests, simple HTML-forms where you click on check boxes or select something from a drop down box. At the end of each quiz page you would have a "send" button which returns a page with your results. On "edit" you can define in wikisyntax the questions and answers. credits for this idea go to Benutzer:Tkarcher. --Elian 23:11, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The company I work for is developing a fairly robust quizzing/homework system, and we'd like to get involved in WikiQuiz for Wikiversity. However, we're a little bit weary about how everything works--we'd like to provide the basics (question authoring and quizzing for multiple-choice, numerical answer, and fill-in-the-blank questions, marked up in the standard Wiki markup), but we don't want to give everything that our business is based on away for free (in other words, we want to provide a scaled-down version of our full engine). Can someone contact me about how this would work? In case it doesn't show (I'm new to the WikiWorld), my email address is jharmon3@yahoo.com Jon the Geek 18:54, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

- There is an open-source learning CMS (content management system), which already has a fairly good quiz engine written in PHP. It's all open source and freely reusable. It's a pretty good system. You can enter questions into a quiz just as easily as taking the quiz. I've written a script myself that does the same thing. --socrates_eight@yahoo.com 23:29, 05 March 2005

Re. quizzing, are you familiar with TOIA? Tools for Online Interactive Assessment http://www.toia.ac.uk/ George

special about language exercises: Ultimate_wiktionary_and_language_exercises

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How I see it

An exciting idea! Here's how I'd build it. Plan for WikiU to be like a real university, in as much as you could use it to learn almost as much as you could in a RealU. Definately use WikiBooks for the textbooks. Have volunteer tutors as "professors" to answer questions about instructional and test material. The trick (and difference from text-based article Wikimedia), is to have a way to create a pool of test problems/questions that can be graded. If someone wanted to get a formal degree, they could challenge the classes at RealU. In a decade or two, we should see diplomas become more like certifications, and less attendance reports. Employers don't care only about book knowledge though, and will want some proof that the applicant can work with other people (at least for most jobs) and that they can stick to something for at least four years.

No powerpoint, not everyone has PP. Use browser based, Java or similar. Should be able to handle complex simulations (chem lab, nuclear engineering, etc.)

- Bwood 03:17, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Don't must be PowerPoint can also Open Office Impress (that also has not everyone but who need it can load it down, and u can also import your PP Slices. All the Browser based prasentation have ythe problem they can't be changed by someone else but that should be an option in the wikiversity. --PatrickD 05:59, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Consider me Dr. Calmypal, professor of Esperanto! I think it would be a great resource for some extra study. Certified teachers should have special protected pages where they list people they've decided understand their material. Degrees would mean nothing in theory, but I might be able to back up a controversial edit if I have a degree in the subject at hand... - Calmypal 00:39, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

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Some very interesting ideas and suggestions. University is our ideal. In many ways we have to offer basics and part of that might might involve a structure and curriculum based on a branching or self educating model. Part of this might involve some or all of the following ideas (some of which have been mentioned):

Awards/points/credits/lets for participation and evolvement and debits for vandalism, anti social behaviour and so on
General tutors available. Sometimes students (and I hope we are all students and teachers in such a collaberation) need ideas and suggestions about how or where to go. So tutors can offer themselves as on line (assuming the communication module is implemented) and be credited or rated on the helpfulness of their contribution. Students might be teachers, simultaneously . . .
People learn in different ways and at different rates. Wikiversity surely can cater for children and those with limited learning skills. Are we talking about education and access to learning or elitism? Many people are put off by the concept of education and schooling. Some would like to retain that excusivity? If people are having fun - they learn. Can we have more fun please?
Sponsored courses for/by commercial groups. I see every reason NOT to allow commercial groups to plaster ads over everything but a small message with a link to a website saying this tutorial was provided for wikiversity by (name of company) where there is clear expertise and desire to learn a system, would seem acceptable? 82.69.58.117 15:49, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Forking

While looking at the Wiki-Cookbook, it occurred to me that I have alternate recipes for some of the things for which there are already recipes. A different recipe would produce a somewhat different result, preferable or not according to a person's taste. So, for matters in Wikibooks other than recipes, it seems that there could be different approaches to reach the same result, equally valid but irreconicable to a single article. I suppose two recipes for cherry pie can go on the same page, but there are differing didactic methods for all kinds of more complex subjects. A Great Books approach to biology might start you off reading (possibly only selections of) The Origin of Species, then more contemporary expansions upon it, whereas a more conventional progression of vocabulary and concepts would simply make a reference to Darwin, a sideline blurb. It would be confusing to have these two approaches take up the same space, and advocates of the Great Books approach might be unwilling to relegate links to their great books to footnotes appended to the conventional material. And within what's considered conventional there are plenty of divisions besides--fundamentally different pedagogical tacks. In what progression should the topics be introduced? Should the density of the language be adjusted in favor of possibly difficult, concise explanations, or more drawn out ones that risk boring those who get it already? In physics, better to rely more on verbalized theoretical examples, or on mathematics? et cetera. You just can't always have it both ways. So, what about forking? For instance, to return to physics, some people need a lot more in the way of analogies and thought explorations at the earlier levels. I guess it would be the same at the higher levels, except these people might be disinclined to go that far, but, anyway by the time one gets there it seems (though I'm certainly no expert) that the level of discourse establishes a more-or-less (yes, frequently less, but still) universal pace. So you have a long road and a short road to get there. It would be a very delicate balance to strike to be able to do both within a single document, and even then you would end up in triage quite a bit. Why not just have two separate ones with a good explanation as to the likely beneficiaries of each? This would be quite an easy thing to do, although I guess no need has arisen yet except for cherry pie. -Aratuk 06:25, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I put my ideas for a wikischool in the wikibooks staff lounge, you should use wikibooks, but take a current version of a completed wikibook and error check it and then put it up so it isn't editable by everyone. if you want to get a degree in this read these books and take the test that goes with them. i admit that the only thing that you could get from current avialable completed wikibooks is a high school diploma (which would make a lot of publicity for the first person to get one from wikivesity). A wikiversity would require all new software to be written just for it. look up "wiki idea" in the staff lounge wikibooks --V2os 21:42, 21 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikiversity: a lecturer's manifesto

Given the existence of Wikipedia, Wikitary, etc., the best use I could see of wikiversity would be a bank of resources for educators/lecturers.

Some Facts

A huge number of (educational) resources are currently available on the net or elsewhere. If we consider access to images to illustrates the lecture, some textbooks begin to adjoin a CD with the illustrations contained in the book, as for instance the textbook of Fundamental Neuroscience (2002, 2d ED), edited by Larry R. Squire and colleagues, but you need to know about their existence and such textbooks are quite expensive. Loads of illustrations can be found by using Google’s option to look for images but there is a total absence of organization and a very important noise to signal ratio; for instance, the Google-image search gives 1.360 hits for a specific term as cochlea, and 60.600 for hearing. Some very good quality illustrations can be found by looking for companion websites to lectures in neurosciences and related fields; for instance, the companion website to the lecture “Neuroscience 524: An Introduction to Brain and Behavior”, by professor Tom Yin at University of Wisconsin (http://www.physiology.wisc.edu/neuro524/index_2002.html) contains about 100 very high quality illustrations scanned from popular textbooks; similarly, wonderful illustrations exist in textbooks, but it takes time to look for them and scan them and then, there is there is the problem of copyright, in case a lecturer wants to use the illustration in some material published on-line. The pictures that are found on other lecturers’ websites have often been scanned from textbooks but scarcely duplicate the copyright notice. If you diligently comply to the copyright laws, you should avoid to copy such resources as long as it is not explicitly stated that they are in the public domain or that you are welcome to copy them. Similarly, references to audio-video material to be used in the context of lectures, references of classic papers as well as papers to serve as readings accompanying lectures, propositions of tutorial activities that are known to work well, are all listed in Instructor’s Resource Manuals as for “Behavioral Neuroscience, Instructor's Resource Manual” (http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbind/pubbooks/kassin2/chapter2/custom3/deluxe-content.html); textbooks can be found on the net, either freely (for instance: http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/dl/free/0070914028/81181/SantrockChap03.pdf), or thanks to a subscription from Edinburgh University (Gazzaniga, M.S., 2000, The New Cognitive Neurosciences. MIT Press, at “http://cognet.mit.edu/library/erefs/gazzaniga/”); some on-line lectures in the public domain are centralized in websites as the one of Lecture Hall (http://www.utexas.edu/world/lecture/); Powerpoint presentations can be found on fellow lecturers’ websites; some lectures’ syllabi are available on-line; they are sometimes accompanied by quizzes to let students test their own understanding about the field.
Any lecturer tempted by an improvement of the quality of their presentation or educational material rapidly discovers that to find these resources is currently extremely time-consuming. The resources evoked above are spread all over the net and there is no quick way to locate them. Some websites publish repository of resources that are research oriented but to my knowledge, there is no repository oriented to the needs of (University) lecturers. There is no website where links to illustrations for lectures are found along with example of lectures (at least, I could not find one, despite hours of browsing). There is a crucial lack of central repository, a central database listing these resources. As a result, although there are loads of resources available, lecturers are not really in a position to exploit them; the lecturers have to renounce to the idea of improving their lecture if they are not ready to spend some of their evenings on that task. More importantly, the time lost by lecturers who decide to search for better illustrations for their lectures is lost again and again by lecturers looking for the same resources.
Access to such resources greatly contributed to the quality of the lectures. I started as a University lecturer a year and a half ago. I had to give lectures prepared by somebody else but, for most of the lectures, I found the illustrations not adequate enough (the lectures had been created one year before I arrived). During the first year, I had the initiative to take some evenings and week-end to set up a repository of resources, with both me and my colleagues in mind. As illustrations, Powerpoint presentations, and lecture notes began to cluster my hard disk, I began to organize these. I separated text from pictures to re-organize the material in several categories: (still) pictures, audio-video material, lecture notes, relevant references (scientific papers or textbooks), glossaries, quizzes (along with exam questions and assignments), tutorial activities, websites with list of links, etc. Easy access to these resources greatly contributed to the quality of my lectures. They were rated as rather poor last year and the year before (I toke up lectures given by somebody else), they were rated as excellent this year (of course, it was not just about adding pictures, I completely reorganized the content too; see next point).
The contribution of such a repository of resource is not necessarily limited to the “look” of the presentation. Again, if I rely on my own experience, browsing the net for illustrations, Powerpoint presentations or lecture notes from fellow colleagues gives the opportunity to get an idea of the different ways to organize a lecture on a given topic. Browsing the net can contribute to rapidly familiarize a lecturer with some new lecture’s contents as well as to improve his/her understanding of some specific topics. As I discovered, reading lecture notes prepared by other lecturers can help refresh a lecturer’s memory in minutes, when it would have taken him/her hours to skim books to get the same results.

What (important) contribution Wiki could bring to lecturers

A catalogue of resources for lecturers/students. The catalogue would provide references to a variety of resources to be used in the context of lectures (links to pictures, audio-video material, references of papers to be provided as readings, lecture notes, Powerpoint presentations, textbooks published on-line or off-line, quizzes, tutorial activities). This project should offer the possibility to encode these resources in a shared database so it can easily be shared with fellow colleagues around the world.

Examples of Bank of resources:
- Database of quiz/test/exam questions. I just designed one for my own use.
- Bank of pictures to illustrate educational material. Examples: http://viperlib.york.ac.uk/, http://www.pics4learning.com/. I have on my hard disk more than 500 high quality images to be used as illustrations for lectures. They are organized by theme, and stored in powerpoint files (because powerpoint allows to store textual information, images, video, and sound in the same document and because any arbitraty ordering of the pages can be imposed).

It could be completed by a set of "technical documents"
- Guidelines for teachers, as for instance http://teaching.berkeley.edu/bgd/teaching.html. This could be guidelines on writing descriptors and learning outcomes, an introduction to the different types of learning styles, guidelines on how to prepare lectures on powerpoint, or examples of how to implement quiz/test/educational exercises (an example at http://lang.swarthmore.edu/makers/index.htm)
- Guidelines for students. This could be guidelines on how to make a presentation, guidelines on how to write a good report, information about plagiarism, etc.

There will be a need to dedicate a certain amount of time to decide of the best way to encode these different types of information. Inspiration may be found in the following product: Catalyzer and Mercat, recently developed by Axiope company (see http://www.axiope.com). Catalyzer is a catalogue creation software which lets the user take control of the structure and content, with predefinition of field types for a large variety of electronic documents. The information stored in this catalogue can be shared with fellow colleagues via internet, thanks to Mercat.

Difficulties to foresee

Copyright issue. To prevent a possible request to withdraw the resource following the discovery of a breach of copyright, authorisation to publish a reference to a given resources should be obtained for every entry of the (public) database by the person who adds this resource to the database. For resources other than pictures, link to the original resource will be provided, no local copy will be made (still, authorization to publish an entry referring to that link should be obtained). For pictures, it is, I believe, more desirable to offer a preview of the picture, so that the user can immediately make a decision about whether to download it. In order to minimize the risk of a copyright fraud when doing so, the following line of action is proposed: (a) display a preview of the picture when copyright authorization has been received; (b) display a preview of the picture in black and white or with a stamp over the picture if the copyright holder has agreed to a copy in that format; (c) display a picture containing only a stamp “copyright not obtained” for any other resource of picture type.
Referencing. There will be a need to cross-reference the resources stored in a database, such that a person can define a search based both on the type of resource (video, quiz, etc.) and on the field of study. This could be quite time-consuming. + there may be a need to define the level of study (school level, 1st year undergraduate, post-graduate; for instance for quiz questions) and therefore to decide of equivalence between different educational systems.

As many others, I am ready to contribute to this catalogue for the fields I cover in my lectures. I am more than willing to share my knowledge, experience, and resources that could be useful to this project. In the past, I published a museum website used for tutorials (http://www.ulb.ac.be/psycho/museum.html), I published a paper on how to increase the intereractivity of web-based educational materials, and I recently submitted a project to an e-learning grant for some kind of similar project. I have a large number of resources ready to share. But I am afraid, I can only dedicate evenings and week-ends to this (that is the ones I am not working on my own stuff). But that's the point, what is missing is a system by which lecturers could share their resources with a limited cost in terms of time... and do this in a better way than the current one, which consists to produce a multitude of largely overlapping and largely redundants resources spread all over the web. What is needed is a structure which allows the easy sharing of resources and that's exactly what Wiki projects are about!

The main problem is not in the writing, but in the finding. Libraries are concerned with this, as they have been spending hundreds of years findig ways to make books accessable to researchers. We need to duplicate (and enhance!) ways of finding information, otherwise this will be just One More Big Linklist. --WiseWoman 12:28, 2 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly, need to distinguish learning from teaching

I am not sure wikiversity is the best name. First, it evokes diversity more than university. Second, various resources could be shared across different levels of education (primary and secondary schools). On the other hand, something like Wiki4Learning is too vague (wikipedia is also for learning). Then, there is the issue that most of the comments above relate to learning materials to be published on Wiki. Here, what I propose is the creation of a resource to help in teaching activities. Is it that we need to create a separate resource: Wikiteaching?

--mlange 01:46, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I like the Wikiversity name. Perl 02:22, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I think a major differential from wikipedias could be the inclusion of 'Specialists' i.e. users who actively specialise in one area, and are marked as such. In any 'Discuss This Article' they would have highlighting, and their response would carry more weight in 'I Don't Get It' options (calls for help).

Let´s organize the Wikiversity

I would propose to create something like: Wikiversity:Organization On this page we may:

Discuss and work on how Wikiversity is going to be structured.

Unify the different discussions that now are taken place in different pages about Wikiversity. For example, here and in http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks_talk:Wikiversity

Organize them by topics.

Create the different departments where specilized users may talk about their own topics.

For example Wikiversity:Department of Linguistics

Create a Wikiversity:multilingual coordination to promote the coordination with future wikiversity proyects in other languages. (Even though somebody wrote that Wikiversity should be firstly only in English. Why cannot other languages begin parallel discussions about their own wikiversity?: "University" is related to Universalis, I think that we shouldn´t close doors to other wikiversity realities)

--Javier Carro 08:53, 16 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Here are some specific starter page ideas for when we find a space to get started (maybe we should just go ahead and start back over on the wikibooks wiki, and delete this page):

start with a front page using the wikibooks front page as a template (with multiple languages)
have a welcome page for each language
a FAQ page
a topics page for each language
a page for those interested in creating a new course - go through a series of questions - what language, what topic area, what name(space) to use for the course.
a page like Wikibookians - list all those participating in building the Wikiversity
try to get a sample course off the ground quickly to illustrate how to do various things (organize the course pages, handle student questions and discussions, upload and use multimedia resources, link to existing wikibooks and wikipedia resources, etc.). An easy to understand course.

This is hard and easy at the same time. There are tons of materials out there - but very few people are willing to be the first ones out. It is easy to make a bad course and a lot of work to produce a good one - so many people prefer to try and sell the good ones (of course, many bad ones are sold as well....). --WiseWoman 12:33, 2 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

create a standard infobox that each course should fill out - with fields such as: course title, "prerequisites", estimated time, languages, topics covered.

I started testing out pages for the actual Wikiversity here. --DougHolton 17:00, 16 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Wikiversity => Wikisophia

(Cross-posted on foundation-l and briefly summarized on de.wikiversity.org)

During and after our visit to the free software conference in South Africa, Angela and I talked a lot about the Wikiversity project, and the potential Wikimedia has to develop a truly global, free institution of learning as a new project.

As you probably know, these discussions are currently focused on

   http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity

and the talk page.

Don't panic: We're still a long way from launching anything. I'm not going to push this until we have the server situation under control and the existing projects have stabilized a bit. Nevertheless, there's one issue that I'd like to resolve now, which is the naming of the project.

Angela, Jimbo Wales, Daniel Mayer (mav) and I agree that the name Wikiversity is problematic in that it ties the project very strongly to the idea of traditional universities. This may lead to certain expectations as to its structure and the services it will provide (e.g. faculties, degrees), but also limit the project in other ways, e.g., by being perceived primarily or only as an institution of teritary learning.

I'd like us to look at ideas for primary and secondary education as well, and I don't want to run into a wall because the established people of the Wikiversity community will say "It's an electronic university, this doesn't belong here."

Angela suggested the name Wikisophia.org/.com, which is currently owned by Peter Danenberg (WikiTeX). I loved the idea immediately: the Greek sophia means "wisdom", but also has many other meanings in the area of learning. It is specific enough to be useful and vague enough to not limit the project very early in its nature or scope.

Peter is willing to give us the name if we push WikiTeX a little to get it security-reviewed and installed on our servers, which seems like a fair deal to us.

So, after discussing this in a small circle, I'd like to announce my intention to move the relevant pages on Meta and edit the summary to reflect the name change. This does not affect the existing efforts under the Wikibooks domain which use the "Wikiversity" label, but only any potential future eLearning/eTeaching project we intend to pursue. de.wikiversity.org could be renamed and moved to the new domain once it is owned by Wikimedia.

Thoughts and comments are welcome. Hopefully, we can find a consensus on this without needing a vote.--Eloquence 22:12, 9 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is a good call. I myself have been uneasy with the way the name "Wikiversity" makes people expect in advance a long list of things that traditional universities have -- "courses", "professors", "students", "departments/faculties", "degrees", and so on.

On another note, do you (or anyone) know what the status is of the current form of Wikiversity? It seems like many people are not very optimistic about it, but I'm not sure how seriously to take that. Is it really stalled? I have a lot of ideas for a radically different way of structuring it, if people think a rethinking of the project is needed. I intend to become an independent scholar after I finish my undergraduate degree, and so I'm very keen on trying to make sure a functioning wiki-learning project happens. Zach 22:54, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Personally, I think that the current effort on Wikibooks is doomed without additional software support for eLearning -- both authoring and testing. We have to take a look at Moodle and similar eLearning platforms and determine the feature set we need before launching this officially. I intend to write a report about Wikisophia later this year, but if you want to help with the technical evaluation, that would be most welcome.--Eloquence 15:05, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I think the software is a very important issue, and one I'd like to try to help with. But I think there are more issues too: a lot of the intended material/courses on Wikiversity hasn't been able to take off even though it doesn't need special software. If a part of what we are trying to accomplish is "courses", which are the equivalent of hundreds of encyclopedia articles, how do we attract people willing and competent to write them? How do we reconcile the problem of scholars fundamentally disagreeing about things with wiki ideas of collective, anonymous authorship? These are some of the problems I'm thinking about. When school finishes for me (July) I'll start posting some concrete ideas here. Zach 13:13, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Although I believe this awful coup d'etat is already on the backburner, I want to make clear - as someone who has lobbied for this project for a while - how firmly I oppose this. There is no reason why we cannot proceed under the actually meaningful name of Wikiversity (or Wikiuniversity), and make clear its differences from a real-world university - just as when people go to Wikipedia they don't expect articles written and peer reviewed by academics. Instead, we now have a proposed name that means absolutely nothing at a glance - where the names of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource and even Wikispecies give the reader some idea of what the project is about, Wikisophia gives them absolutely bugger all. I also strongly oppose Erik's efforts to ignore all the work that has been done on creating the e-learning mockup at Wikibooks to then go on his own tangent and start his Wikispecies-in-the-making. Finally, I'm not convinced that we actually need any more software features before going live. We can draw up courses here on the Wiki. We can administer courses here on the Wiki. We have the additional tools of email and IRC to provide other communication options where necessary. Particularly if - as I have always argued - we do not offer any form of certificate (which would just get messy) - and concentrate on the learning and teaching, then we have no need for testing software or anything along those lines. Wikiversity could easily go live today, but for a Wikinews-like proposal beforehand. I will vehemently oppose any doomed fork of this. Ambi 03:14, 5 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Simply, I second Ambi's statement. I'll be managing the School of Communications as a preparatory/supplemental resource for collegiates. There is little reason to alter the course nor name of the Wikiversity. The only practical deficiency is an active participation by University students and professors. Downchuck 04:34, 9 August 2005 (UTC) On a related note, the Wikiversity is currently threatened with expulsion from its existing residence. Wikibooks:Wikibooks:Votes_for_deletion Downchuck 10:22, 12 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think those interested in this discussion would also be interested in wikibooks:Talk:Wikiversity:About. Please take a look. Cormaggio 11:09, 20 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Vote for Deletion Comments

This is just a notice that a Vote for Deletion discussion is happening on en.wikibooks regarding its status on Wikibooks. Please keep most of the comments on that discussion page (it may be moved to a sub-page on Wikibooks due to discussion length). This notice is mainly to let people know who have not seen the notice of the VfD discussion so far. --Roberth 12:56, 12 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikiversity "Relaunch"

I have made a proposal on a new time table for launching this project. I am placing the time table here for further discussion and to try and "kick start" this process to actually go somewhere. --Roberth 02:15, 16 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

See below:

Now to 15 Sept 2005:

Discussion for modifying the scope of this project (done on meta and not Wikibooks) will take place over the next month. *BE BOLD* and change the goals to something that can happen realistically.

15 Sept 2005 to 1 Nov 2005:

Formal voting to accept/reject this project, as per New project policy and general policies adopted after Wikinews. The English version of the voting page has already been written, but translations need to be done to other languages before voting begins. Hopefully the german version can get written quickly as it already has its own wiki run under the Wikimedia server farm and semi-official status as it is.

1 Nov 2005 to 15 Nov 2005:

Formal submittal to the Foundation Board for acceptance/denial/rework of proposal. This has been kicking around long enough that hopefully there are enough opinions already about the value of this project.

15 Nov 2005 to 1 Jan 2006:

If approved, a transwiki to en.wikiversity.org from en.wikibooks will begin. This will be a complicated process, and there is going to be some arguing about what parts need to stay on Wikibooks and what parts need to be moved. This may get ugly simply because the distinction really hasn't been in place so far. Some discussion about this is more than likely going to take place on Wikibooks, as it already has with with the VfD discussion currently taking place.

2 Jan 2006 to 30 Jan 2006:

(If approved) Cleanup of Wikibooks to remove links/redirects/other left overs from Wikiversity. The current group of admins/users on Wikibooks can easily handle this issue.

Remember that this is a proposed timetable, and can be changed, although you had better have a good reason to change the above time table. The point of this is to set a "hard" deadline on when this project can be "greenlighted" and accepted by the foundation board, or rejected. Further discussion on Wikibooks should be limited at best, and all discussion should take place here on Meta. Notes to that effect will be put on Wikibooks. The time limits for discussion were adopted primarily from the New Project Policy and are required by the foundation, except for the time table for reworking the goals of this project. --Roberth

Updated proposal

I've taken it upon myself to update the proposal a bit. Wikiversity is not planning to do research (there is already the publishing wiki for that. And while some courses may be graded, not all will (its up to the teacher). I also linked to the new About page that seems to have no objections so far. The about page helps to clarify the goals of Wikiversity. --Gabe Sechan 07:35, 18 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Even if there's no research being planned at the moment, who says it won't be doing research in the future? It seems to me that all systems and organisations need to do their own research (or reflection) to continually improve. See the Wikimedia Research Network for examples of this in Wikimedia. Cormaggio 08:30, 18 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Lets break research into two things. First, there's research into new methods of teaching using wikis. This is of course allowed and ought to be encouraged, this is how we improve. Secondly, there's academic research- investigating new theories, social science experiments, and the like. Working on a new form of math or Unified Field Theory would be an example. That is research that real world universities typicly do, but IMHO ought to be beyond the scope of wikiversity. It was references to that type of research I removed. In fact the about page puts in an exception on the original research part for wiki learning ideas. So I think we're in accord here, unless I'm misreading you and you think Wikiversity should be doing academic research? --Gabe Sechan 08:54, 18 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the first type of research you refer to should be allowed and encouraged - that was the type I was referring to. And I agree that we should probably not encourage the second type in as far as allowing any crank theories to be published - as wikibooks:Wikiversity:About currently says: "Wikiversity is not a place to publish primary research, such as proposing new theories and solutions, original ideas (other than ideas for online wiki learning)". However, and maybe this just needs rephrasing, but I'm not sure I agree or that we can always delineate between the two. For example, if you have a sociology course, how are you going to stop the students from doing their own research? All e-learning is going to be more self-directed or conducted in small cohort groups, and this fits perfectly with the research model, whereby it is the practice itself which is the site of learning. Don't know if that makes sense, or whether I'm addressing your point completely. Cormaggio 13:10, 18 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps some rewording is necessary on that part. Yes, a sociology class may well have students do an experiment (which can be considered research) as an assignment. The idea is more to stop people from using Wikiversity as a host for crank theories, and non-verifiable material (such as research that has not been peer reviewed). Since I ripped the wording off from wikibooks, it probably should be rewritten to be a bit less strict that their version. If you have ideas on how to do so, please go ahead and edit the page. --Gabe Sechan 16:07, 18 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You mean I can do that? :-) Yes, I'm going to move over to that page and its talk page for now - I'm really quite concerned personally about its content, specifically its goals (eg. "The main goal of Wikiversity is to teach" - euch) Cormaggio 16:56, 18 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

something realistic. "the initial scope of Wikiversity can and should be toned down to something realistic that can be accomplished with the current set of tools available with MediaWiki software" (source.
The basic idea has always been the creation of "online courses". I think there is room for innovation in what a wiki course would be and such innovation is something that will evolve with time, but maybe we can start by looking at what already exists. Is there anyone who has gone through the list of courses and could summarize the high points? Alternatively, can someone nominate what they think is a good example of an existing course? The Wikiversity page currently points to this course which seems to just be an outline and probably not being actively developed. There actually seems to be a functioning class here. Unless there is something better, I suggest changing the link at the Wikiversity page that currently points to the "iQuantum" outine to point to the active Great War course. --Memenen 06:30, 23 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think you should just do this, and if you or anyone else finds a better one, just do that ;-) Thanks. Cormaggio 09:53, 23 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I also made a list of courses that are "under developmet". I did not find any course that seems more active than The Great War and Versailles, but I may have missed something. --Memenen 00:57, 24 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikiversity? Hmmm... an interesting name, if only someone could pin down the concept. I've looked at some of the existing topics that I could say I know something about (not history by the way). The currently limited content aside, I wasn't very impressed with the organization and focus. Generally speaking, to teach something you have to know a whole lot more about the subject than what you're teaching. To design a course, you'd have to have on top of that experience teaching the material. That's not something built up at the community level; it's insight each individual needs. The outlines and short pieces I looked at clearly had knowledgable creators who wanted to share with others, but an academic presentation was highly lacking. The approach is that of a tutor rather than a teacher. Now I don't have an advanced degree myself, but if that's true about this rudimentary 101-class material, then I'd have to conclude this project doesn't have a leg to stand on. Even if the error can be fixed in these early cases, who's going to be able to judge whether more advanced material is properly organized and focused? There's a reason professors teach university courses rather than folks off the street.

Rather than allowing single users to carve out corners of this supposedly wiki collaboration, I would suggest that the focus be turned to something that the common person could contribute his or her jewel of knowledge to. And rather than using Wikiversity as an excuse to write at length stuff that would otherwise be hacked out of Wikibooks and Wikipedia, I would suggest that the format be turned away from explanations and made interactive. A viable quiz format that provides users with feedback doesn't have to be boring and static so long as it can be altered in a wiki style. If that can't somehow be done with existing wikimedia software then maybe there's no point in starting. But assuming some ingenious application, the test case for this project, as I see it, is language. That's something you can't write explanations for at length since the target user wouldn't understand anyways. Thus it would prove that Wikiversity is teaching something and not just writing about it. It's also something everyone knows something about, or at least thinks they do, or something for which the success would be measurable, at least. Through conversation or essays, any native speaker, not just the professor him/herself, would have a very clear idea of how much was learned, and to what extent Wikiversity was accomplishing its goals. This is in contrast to some of these sciences and more academic topics where a professor would be happy enough to find that students have learned whatever material that professor thinks to be relevant. These make poor test cases since no one would really know how well the system worked.

In short, I'm not buying this "university-grade" euphoria. Friends and I have taken informal classes like guitar and sign language before and they don't work. For online courses, there are doubts even when offered by accredited universities. Wikiversity would put those two concepts together. And then who's going to build it? Frankly I don't feel I'm qualified to contribute to anything beyond high-school level courses, which is what I'd rate most of what's presently available even if it is taught (that is, reviewed) in college. Now, foreign-language courses fall somewhere in between. Consider that universities regularly grant degrees to people who can marginally speak the language and not to blue-collar workers in foreign lands who speak it natively. I know there'd be a lot of interest in an English course and I'm qualified to contribute. Give me a course in Spanish and I'll tell you how it compares to similar courses taught in university as well as what you can learn from marketed software. So could a lot of other people. Start with something easy yet useful and prove to everyone that the project concept works. If that much can't be done, then any certificates granted, let alone degrees, aren't going to mean squat. 59.112.33.170 18:15, 18 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

TO design a course you need to have in depth knowledge of a topic, true. However, you need the same in depth knowledge to write an encyclopedia entry. I don't really see much difference between the two. Those with the knowledge and willingness to participate will develop the material they specialize in, and polish it over time. Just like in Wikipedia. If we're worried about the dpeth of knowledge needed causing it to fail, we ought to be worried about Wikipedia as well. Yet it has managed to thrive, and I think Wikiversity will as well.

Interactive education- there's some of that planned. Teachers planning on doing IRC chats ( I will with my course as soon as my computer is out of storage), wiki forums, group projects, etc. Just because you don't see much yet doesn't mean we don't have it planned and encourage more.

I disagree with your comment on languages from the begining. Are languages good topics for courses? Sure! Are they better than math and science? I don't think so. Math and science have very easy to measure end points- did you understand the concept? If so, you should be able to solve a problem. If not, you won't. Languages are much more fuzzy- there's semantics, syntax, connotation and denotation (which can take years to learn). In addition, there are a lot of people with advanced degrees on the net, and looking at wikiversity- they can easily make sure the level of content is up to snuff on any math or science course. But feel free to start up our first languages course (at least I think it'd be the first)- the current focus on math and science is because a lot of geeks love the idea and are running with the ball. Go in there and score a point for the liberal arts :)

Who will build the courses you ask? The same kind of people who build ridiculously detailed and obscure wikipedia articles. Those who know enough to write paragraphs on the Halting Problem probably can teach a lesson on the subject. I'm not qualified to teach any language (being unilingual), but I'm qualified to teach math up through linear algebra (I actually did mentor it in college), computer science for all of undergrad education except 1 or 2 topics, and low level courses in a few other sciences. You apparently wouldn't be able to contribute to them, but think you could to a language class. Now find 50 more contributors, and our strengths and weaknesses will overlap and give us pretty good general coverage for low level courses, and some coverage for high level. I expect that we'll start out with HS level and low college level courses. Thats fine- we need that material, and its what people will need to start learning a subject anyway. Over time, more high level content will be written as we gain people capable of writing it.

One last comment- Wikiversity is not issuing degrees. Not now, most likely not ever- there's just too many problems and pitfalls with that idea. Its not a place to take an online course and get a Bachelor's, its a place to learn a subject. Meaning most likely we have motivated students, avoiding one huge problem of online courses (I know, I've both taken and helped run online courses at colegiate level). And we don't need to worry about something that doesn't exist meaning anything. Out only job is to try to put out the best learning material possible, and to improve on that material.--Gabe Sechan 19:03, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You have to have the same in-depth knowledge to teach a lesson as to write an encyclopedia entry. However, to design a course, objectives and all, you have to already have experience teaching the material in order to know how to approach the subject and break it down. That's what teachers learn to do in their profession. It would be experienced teachers who put together courses rather than just those knowledgable on the topic. Certainly there are contributors able to do this, though fewer, especially as you go up in level.

The real problem is that professorship isn't so wiki because it's not aggregate. In retrospect, any early start would have to be driven by individuals, so my assessment of the current courses is not fair. More constructively, I was trying to suggest ways in which a course would be a collection of contributions rather than a one-man show, yet without reading like a book. Forums and chat, though interactive, don't fulfill that desire.

It's not that I object to a community of learning centered around Wiktionary or Wikibooks content, or even content developed to that end. It's just that I wouldn't consider that community to be wiki, per se. The question, essentially, is what Wikiversity could offer above that. Courses are naturally interactive in that there is always feedback provided on how much is being absorbed, so it would seem that this interaction must be captured in its essence in some joint, communal effort.

On language, I'm not comparing the teaching of different courses. The point is to prove their success, or more broadly the success of Wikiversity. Certainly the professor knows if the students learn what is taught, which would hopefully be pertinent and comprehensive. But that wouldn't prove anything to the masses. On the other hand, if a department takes up the task of teaching English, say, as a second language, any English speaker would be able to judge for themselves the degree of accomplishment. A functional language school would build belief and confidence in this concept for expansion to any other subject area.

Degrees aside, I would hope that this school, which has being both online and informal working against it, could at least arrange courses into some sort of hierarchy mimicking a real university. The ultimate goal of the program, recognized or not, must be to share the same content that real professors teach and students in those brick-and-mortars are credited for learning. 59.112.35.95 20:20, 27 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Software: If we went live today on, say, en.wikiversity.org with the set of tools we now have, would it prevent us from implementing ideas/initiatives down the line or could those functionalities be added down the line? Is the software issue an obstacle at the moment, or would it just be nice to have these things? (And what things?) Cormaggio 09:53, 23 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There is a list of desired software modifications. My top priority would be some type of PHP-based form that could be used for quizes or exams, with the results sent directly to instructors. I'm not a big fan of testing, but students and instructors need some kind of feedback in order to tell if learning is happening. I've been wondering if there could be some way to do RSS feeds for each course. A student should not have to go hunting for new material and assignments and other documents for courses. --Memenen 21:14, 23 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ok great, but that wasn't really my question. Everyone will have ideas on what functionalities they would like, but my question is: will it be harder to implement these later on or could we just set up a domain now more or less with what we have now and add these features later on? Essentially, what are we waiting for? (I am just asking here - I genuinely don't know) Cormaggio 00:27, 24 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

there have been discussions suggesting to open a new wikis to welcome test version of potential new projects, an incubator wiki. What is your opinion on the matter ? Do you think it might be helpful ? If you are interested, please join the next board meeting on irc (open). See board agenda. Anthere 15:28, 24 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

In terms of incubation, I don't think it is needed specifically for Wikiversity, but for projects similar in nature that are created in the future. This is a two-year old project already, based on just the history of the en:Wikibooks:Wikiversity page. I know I am forcing the issue with the board, but it appears as though this is a project that is past due for getting a green light as its own project and seperate wiki. If the board wants to continue this as an incubation project, that is of course up to the board, but based solely on the public support for this project, I think they are ready to move on. Of course, the public vote is going to be useful anyway, and is "according to policy". I don't think the move needs to be rushed. All it really needs is a little bit of leadership to push it into the correct direction. As can be seen above, there are already many people willing to take on the reigns of active leadership and contribution once it goes to its own seperate Wikimedia project. There is no need to worry about Wikiversity becoming something like Wikispecies. --Roberth 21:42, 24 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Project description page/other languages

I've been trying to follow as closely to the letter what the New project policy suggests, and I'm not sure if having working version of the project in multiple languages is sufficient for the vote. I just don't want to jeapordize the chance for this project to succeed, and trying to get language translations is like trying to pull teeth... particularly since translators have other tasks they would like to accomplish.

Even so, the voting instructions have been translated into the requisite 5 languages, so it appears that the vote can technically begin on September 15th as planned. My intention is to make this as smooth as possible, and I'm also going to try and advertise the vote on as many wikis and mailing lists as reasonably possible. I don't see any reason that we should have fewer than about 20 votes for/against this proposal, and perhaps many more. The more languages that we can have translated before the time of the vote, the better the response will be from a wider Wikimedia user base... and more importantly how well recieved such a proposal will be with the Foundation board. --Roberth 01:15, 1 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

My view

We've had wikiversity around for a while. I don't think anything great has happened with it. It would just be better to actually make e-books in my opinion. When a bunch of people are working on e-books we'll have more stuff on wikibooks. I did take an interest into the wikiversity project a few months ago but I decided, "Wikibooks and Wikipedia seems like it has more use." The Wikiversity would be an interesting open-source project if MIT OpenCourse didn't exist.

However, it does. Wikibooks has many books that aren't completely developed yet and need more work. --Cyberman 05:31, 16 September 2005 (UTC)Cyberman[reply]

Does MIT OpenCourse exist in every language of the world, or even two ? Or only in english ? Anthere 06:00, 16 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I love MIT OpenCourseware. Don't get me wrong. But it has multiple, significant, failings.

THey don't accept additional material from the community.
Related to the above- the quality of the material heavily depends on the professor and his liking for the project. Some are amazing. Others are just syllabi
They have a focus on helping fellow educators- meaning syllabi, lesson plans, etc are the focus. Our focus is on helping students. Meaning instructional content is the focus
Its impossible to add new classes to their project. Even if they have no similar course yet.
The scarcity of material, and its close linking to non-free (as in beer) books can make learning new topics difficult. I tried following some of the chemistry classes. I had a year of college chem. I failed miserably.

I don't see us as being made obsolete by OCW. I also don't see OCW as making us unnecessary. We have different goals and strengths. If anything we can compliment one another's efforts, as a student now has multiple resources to choose from. This is always a plus- the more available ways to learn material, the higher the chance one of the ways will make sense to the student.

As for Wikibooks- I see even more of an opportunity for the two of us to build off one another there. Classes require books. Wikibooks will be the repository for our class books. In producing a class, you need to assure the book is high quality. One can even think of Wikiversity as a set of annotations and extra non-book materials for a wikibook, increasing the chance it will be understood by the readers.--Gabe Sechan 16:46, 16 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I would also be happy that those voting remember that wikiversity will not be in english only. So, while other structures to compare to wikiversity exist in english, they may not in italian or japanese. I hope people can vote thinking beyond their mother language. Anthere 18:11, 16 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

First impressions

This is an excellent concept. I have 2 comments so far. Firstly nowhere have I seen a reference to the potential value of Wikisource in this work. Secondly, I would like to see Wikiversity being a vehicle for the study of the history of technology world-wide. There seems to be a tendancy in academe today to place the history of technology as a small part of the history of science. Much historical investigation concentrates on the history of the impact of technology on society, rather than the histories of the technics themselves. Certainly in the UK at least the secondary schools curriculum concentrates on the social history of technology such as the slums in the C19 and the history of the evolution of machine tools, without which the Industrial Revolution would never have occurred, is ignored. Apwoolrich 07:58, 16 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Currently, an attempt has been made to organize wikiversity around conventional academic divisions. This makes sense as a starting point for wikiversity, but it does not mean that wikiversity must remain trapped in conventional approaches to learning. One of the great opportunities for wikiversity is that instructors will be free to abandon traditional categorizations of human knowledge and offer alternative ways of learning about the world. I agree that a strong case can be made for placing human tool use and technology at the center of an intellectual analysis of the human condition. I'm starting to think that the true power of wikiversity might be in the construction of "Portals" that are similar in character to the topic portals of wikipedia. In constructing a wikiversity portal, an instructor (or, hopefully, a cooperating group of instructors and students) will be able to provide students with a coherent strategy for making sense of the world, a launch platform that will appeal to certain students and allow them to explore the world from a certain perspective using certain organizing principles. Such portals will probably be the "schools of thought" that will attract students, particularly if they build on the best information available and point students towards viable strategies for living constructive lives in the future. --JWSurf 17:50, 17 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A Distributed Self-Organizing Teaching System

The hardest part of on-line courses for credit and certification is testing and evaluation. That requires manpower, and vigilance against cheats. And global standards, and political controversy. Its a bureaucratic nightmare!

In the spirit of the user-operated self-organizing nature of Wiki, I would propose a more distributed, school of thought model of e-professorship. As in the days of the ancient Greeks, a professor puts up his shingle and waits for customers. The e-shingle advertises your accredation and credibility, publications, academic record, etc.

If a student wants a degree, they seek out a reputable professor in the appropriate Wiki-department of their specialty, and registers, paying whatever tuition the individual professor charges. This is a very powerful aspect of this scheme, because it is self-funding. Professors with greater reputations can charge higher fees, and insurance against gouging is guaranteed by the free competition with other professors. In any case the fee paying is done completely independently from Wikiversity, as a private transaction between the student and the prof. This keeps Wikiversity "pure", not open to corruption.

When a student signs up for a course, the professor adds a student page to his "students" list. All tests and exams are designed by the individual professors, who are responsible for checking on the identies and integrity of their students. The professor has to watch out for cheats, and he stakes his reputation on the merit-worthiness of his certifications. When credits or degrees are awarded, they are posted on the student's page, which is moved to the Graduates list on the professor's page, free for all to verify. The degree basically states that Professor So-and-so testifies to the fact that in his judgment this person is worthy of the degree awarded. It is up to the prof. how he reaches this judgment.

The role of Wikiversity is to accredit the professors. All the professors in a specialty pool together to form a department, and select a Dean from amongst themselves. The Dean in turn checks on the credibility of the professors and certifies them as valid professors of his department. Like the individual professors, individual departments have to protect their own credibility by watching out for fraud or abuse. Departments should rise or fall on their merits. And the departments elect a President from amongst themselves, and the President in turn certifies the departments as valid departments of Wikiversity.

Isn't that what Wiki is all about? Slehar 18:25, 17 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Would you advocate some sort of feedback system and ranking for the professors?--Eshafoshaf 13:20, 7 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Style Peer Review

I have read a lot about how the Wikiversity could allow teachers to "set up shop." But one thing I haven't seen is the idea of havnig students do projects/assignments/homework and then having a peer review of the work. As an adult learner, I am much less interested in having someone tell me what, when and how to learn. However, I am extremely grateful for the feedback that a Wiki community offers. This could be codified in the software by having quees of assignments that community members could annonymously "grade." As I post my work, I might get 2-3 feedback comments. This would allow different rates of learning, would open the courses up to other content, etc... Thoughts?--Eshafoshaf 22:11, 6 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Its a good idea for those who don't mind putting their work out there for fear of being insulted. In fact, I think I mentioned something similar on the wikibooks page once. We don't even really need to wait for software fixes to do this- we could just have a pages of links to hw assignments uploaded, and you can put the hw on the wiki. Then we could leave comments on the talk page. We can even have it as an iterative process- you upload, we advise, you fix, we reinspect, and so on. That can be a lot more helpful than just "#1,2, and 5 are wrong".

The only real problem with this is you need to keep a community of volunteers around to grade the homework. Most wikis you read, fix, and move on. Keeping people around to help others is doable I think, but more difficult.--Gabe Sechan 22:32, 6 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that you could implement this using exisiting tech, but I am in favor of a process that enforces a queue of assignements. Left to the current wiki process, I am afraid that it would be difficult to ensure that all the assignments would be graded. Further, it would be nice to have annonymity but still be able allow users to track which assignments have been responded to. I really like the idea of an iterative process!

You make a good point about getting the community of volunteers. However, I think we might find, at least for certain subjects, we might find a whole new community of users for this type of system. In fact, as an educational model, teaching is the best way of learning and this philosophy could be applied within WikiVersity by making assignments to grade other particpants work. So English II students grade English I, etc...--Eshafoshaf 13:17, 7 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think a software change will help much, we could just use different cats and templates. You can see this in action at the Academic Publishing Wikicity, which is centered around developing professional-level wiki journal articles with a peer-review system to critically assess them much like with the Featured Article system. Anyway check out the Wikicities tour to see each step of the Peer Review process. I think the system they've worked out over there would work well for this proposal too. Unfortunately it's not until something is actually reviewed that we'll know if it works well or not. :( Garrett 03:44, 8 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Some thoughts on content format

In my opinion the current format of wiki pages is deficient. I assume that in the very near future people will want to have low power devices that mostly consist of an OLED or e-paper display, a small processor with a WLAN interface and a long lasting accumulator. With an e-paper display that keeps its content without permanent refresh the device could turn itself off and only resume to render a few new pages. If the processor of the device is too inefficient for the rendering process the rendering could even migrate to a computer on the network. An important precondition for this is a well defined page format because you want to be able to turn pages instead of scrolling in large web pages. A description for a possible format for books is the JAR book. WikiTeX is trying to bring latex objects to wiki, what I'm suggesting is to bring a pixel exact rendering standard (like TeX) to wikiversity, at least as one possible choice for rendering. I would suggest to assume an edgewise (portrait mode) rendering device with 768 pixels width and 1024 pixels height as default (or assume 300 dpi and choose a sensible page size). A well defined book format would also ease the publishing of such books (e.g. as bittorrents) with revision numbers and errata pages that list changes between old books and newer versions. Such a book format, if not implemented as plugin for the browser, could also be easily implemented in a proxy or http daemon. For small devices, unable to render a book, the final format could be TIFF or another image format. --Fasten 08:59, 11 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not so sure that this is a good idea. First off, I disagree that e-paper is going to get big anytime soon. THey just aren't very convenient, hurt your eyes after a while, and generally just don't really fill a need. I'm really skeptical of all that "electronic X is the next big thing" talk. We were all supposed to be using tablet-pcs and gotten rid of laptops and desktops by now, and I sitll don't know anyone who owns one.

I disagree. E-Paper is an obvious development. A production quality e-paper will be close to indistinguishable from actual paper and people will simply refuse to buy newspapers when an e-paper can be used to read books, newspapers and anything else with the same convenience but much more control about the content. There isn't anything technologically challenging in designing low power computers with WLAN and large, convenient e-paper displays once e-paper displays have reached a certain quality. My point is that for e-paper as a medium it would be wise to get rid of any scrolling requirement today. Wikimedia could help in developing an open and free draft standard here. --Fasten 15:23, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

ePaper To Be Used For Newspapers and Magazines by 2007 --Fasten 17:02, 14 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Beyond that, pixel perfect rendering isn't necessarily a good idea. The reason HTML originally got popular was that it was easy- a lot of computer semi-literates could understand b,i, and a tags. Then the programmers got at it and added XHTML and DHTML and CSS and removed simple to understand tags like center with div. And people stopped using HTML. Wikitext was born as a way of simplifying HTML, to make things even easier. A small featureset, but easy to use. And life was good again.

Pixel perfect rendering doesn't have to mean any changes to the wiki language, it just means that there would be a layout standard people could aim for in their layout and that standard would help people to put wiki pages on devices that don't allow scrolling but allow to turn pages. Writing wiki pages and viewing wiki pages on web browsers could remain entirely unchanged, only the authors of books would be asked to occasionally verify their layout in the book format. --Fasten 15:23, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Now if you introduce latex, we have a wiki that is not easy to edit. This means we have a high barrier to entry. We lose a lot of contributors, and less content makes us grow slower. This obviously isn't good. A wiki needs to be simple and easily edited by the vast majority of people if we want it to be usable. --Gabe Sechan 18:00, 11 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I wasn't promoting WikiTeX, that seems to be in preparation already, and for scientific papers this is an advancement, for everything else it is available as an option but is not required and is not likely to chase away wiki users. If LaTeX was used as a backend to render books, which may not be a bad idea, LaTeX would not appear as a part of the user language. --Fasten 15:23, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A suggestion on categorization and content standardization.

I'm working on a project (ESP) that contains some ideas that might be useful for wikiversity. In this project I'm dealing with ethical code policies that should follow easily recognizable standards. For this purpose the ESP XML schema allows documents to extend each other, like classes in object oriented programming languages. An empty document that only defines a standard for required content, but offers no content is called a schema in ESP (similar to an interface in Java). Documents can extend documents with or without content. Transferred to wiki documents this would mean that a book might declare to follow the content schema for a course "Stochastic I", which itself might be one of several schemas for a category "Stochastic I" (so as not to force all courses to follow the same schema to describe the same topic) and fill that schema with content, following the required chapters and paragraphs in layout. The advantage would be that a common course layout could be offered in different languages, following the same schema; it would also be possible to implement the same course schema several times by different authors who disagree on how the material is best presented. Last but not least existing courses could be enhanced by extending them and exchanging only a part of the material, that a specific author or the requirements of a specific branch of science require to be different. As an example, "Stochastic I" for physicists might differ from "Stochastic I" for biologists in the selection of examples but both could extend a common "Stochastic I" course for mathematicians. --Fasten 09:28, 11 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Learning trail

On top of that there could be learning trails that put material that should be learned in any easily understandable order with transitional passages, forks and cross references to similar material in lecture notes or other courses. A learning trail would also allow to permute the content of a book so that lecture notes could be written to follow a course schema strictly and the actual ordering used by the lecturer could be provided as a trail on top of that. A learning trail could also verify preconditions in knowledge and redirect the reader to previous courses when knowledge is missing. A trail would be a customized learning experience, possibly connecting pieces of different courses to reach a well defined educational goal. As a trail would be more a selection of existing bits and pieces authors of trails would not have to follow schemas.

Wiki Scholarship

Wiki scholarship could be a mapping between course schemas or course categories and users that every user could provide him - or herself. This way everybody could document his own standard of knowledge but there would be no need for verification.

Peer Review

Similarly to scholarship peer review could be presented as a mapping between theses or research papers and scholars who claim expertise in an area. The mapping would reveal who discloses to have read what publication and, if given, what his opinion on the publication was (or if reading of the paper was aborted for lack of quality). Peer Review could also be applied to courses and even homework essays, if they were published on wikiversity. This could, and probably should, be combined with eprints

This eprints thing looks fascinating, but until someone programs a wikitext interpreter to format pages dumped via Special:Export it just won't be feasible due to our license. Perhaps we could have a multilingual subdomain, journals.wikiversity.org, to serve up "published" journal articles. A peer review system for journals is already being experimented upon, see The Academic Publishing Wiki for a fully functional wiki-based peer review system. And of course people will be able to critique our courses, not to mention the inevitable Featured Course voting. I am not entirely certain if articles will be classed as being part of our goal; if not they can just go on the wikicity. Garrett 15:41, 16 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Lecture notes

To aim for something similar to OCW a wiki standard for lecture notes would be useful. I remember very high quality lecture notes in LaTeX from my own studies in computer science. This is probably not the most common case and also lecture notes might be restricted in circulation by the lecturer, depending on local legislation and the willingness of a lecturer to have his or her lecture notes circulated. Students who are allowed to post lecture notes to wikiversity could build a repository of lecture notes, similar to what is available locally at every university and (at least in Germany) is usually maintained by a local student representation (Fachschaft) in every single department and, unfortunately, usually only in paper form. This would probably require wikiversity to categorize lecture notes by university, departments and lecturers but it would still be possible to categorize lecture notes additionally by course/content categories that have a significant overlap with the given lecture notes. Lecture notes could also extend lecture notes of previous years and only modify the parts that have changed in content.

Waaayyy ahe--meh, you see the pattern. :) I think you've kind of misinterpreted us here; we are not a digital/wiki version of your local prof's handouts! Therefore if a lecturer comes to us and agrees to GFDLise his notes we would absorb them into the nearest related Wikiversity course's notes (or perhaps into some sort of holding bin until an applicable course exists), but they would no longer be associated with the originating class in any way other than with GFDL-compliant source credits. Also due to the wiki nature there would not be a separate page for each year's run of a course, rather the same page would be constantly recycled; any notes not currently being utilised would be put in that day's /Archive so that they are excluded from the course but still available when/if needed again. Garrett 15:24, 16 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Annotations

It would be useful to have a standard for annotations, so that students could attach individual explanations or references to courses or lecture notes without editing the material itself. The "What links here" button is close but not quite good enough: It cannot expose links to individual paragraphs and it requires that the user makes use of the button without knowing that there are annotations. At least the presence of annotations, and possibly a categorization, should be immediately visible in the margin.

Waaaaay ahead of you. :) I already have a system in mind whereby a user could quickly edit a section and add something along the lines of {{ann|Why this equals 12 instead of 10}} at the end of a line's punctuation as if it's a footnote/endnote number, thus resulting in this.^?32 The number beside the ? would be auto-generated. It would take you to [[(pagename)/Questions/Why this equals 12 instead of 10]]. Thanks to the awesome inputbox extension you would see the initial content in the edit box and some basic guidelines in the preview space above. For ease of use the annotation button can be added to the toolbar, maybe with a Javascript prompt to guide you through its use. I can throw together a fully-functioning example (minus the Javascript) if anyone's curious to see this in motion. Garrett 15:06, 16 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]