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