Nick: I believe this is a follow-on to the platform that Apple designed to deliver courseware through the iPad called "iBook Author": http://www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks/ http://www.apple.com/apps/itunes-u/ http://www.edxonline.org/about.html
The key point is that reputable educational institutions are developing a lot of online content that will be subject to peer review, evaluation and validation. People will get academic recognition for their work. This is very different from anonymous crowd-sourcing of content. So, if a faculty member or graduate student has the opportunity to work on content using iBook Author/edX vs working on content using MediaWiki/Wikipedia, I suspect that there will be heavy incentives toward the former. Also iBook Author has a friendlier WYSIWYG user interface than MediaWiki.
We should still try to recruit campus ambassadors, but we must recognize that we face tough competition. However, the idealistic desire to share knowledge and the competition between dissemination systems has been around for a long time. That is why I started writing lessons on the PLATO system back in the 1970s. The market will decide whether people will share knowledge on MediaWiki or some other platform. --Bob
Quoting Nicholas Michael Bashour nicholasbashour@gmail.com:
Even more reason to keep expanding the Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors program:
*Top US universities put their reputations online*
This autumn more than a million students are going to take part in an experiment that could re-invent the landscape of higher education.
Some of the biggest powerhouses in US higher education are offering online courses - testing how their expertise and scholarship can be brought to a global audience.
Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have formed a $60m (£38m) alliance to launch edX, a platform to deliver courses online - with the modest ambition of "revolutionising education around the world".
Sounding like a piece of secret military hardware, edX will provide online interactive courses which can be studied by anyone, anywhere, with no admission requirements and, at least at present, without charge.
The rest can be found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18191589
Sincerely,
Nicholas Michael Bashour President Wikimedia District of Columbia Washington, DC, USA