$20 per term is quite modest, perhaps there is something to the corporate takeover I am missing. Signed up anyway and will try it. No doubt I will gain insight.
Fred
On Sep 10, 2005, at 7:06 AM, Robert Scott Horning wrote:
Another group that is much more modest, and the one I would like to use as a model for Wikiversity, is http://www.vu.org/, Virtual University. This project started out as an education-based dial-up BBS in the San Francisco bay area where people would get together and share ideas and hold on-line classes. When wide-spread internet connectivity started to come around, they moved to internet servers and continued to teach classes. Most of their classes were completely free in the beginning, and a very controvercial decision was made to start charging students for "attending classes". It is a modest fee, and mainly to help support the server farm including IRC servers. The instructors are still largely volunteers, and rarely do they even use textbooks. In this regard Wikiversity is already ahead of VU with the Wikibooks project. In many ways I would like to see Wikiversity be more like the way VU was before the "corporate takeover" of the project.