On 14 June 2012 07:41, Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:
On 13/06/12 18:05, Charles Matthews wrote:
On 13 June 2012 17:51, Gordon Jolygordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:
On 13/06/12 16:02, Thomas Dalton wrote:
This sounds like a fantastic project. Thank you Charles for agreeing to lead it and thank you WMUK for agreeing to support it.
What is the current budget?
I'm making business cases for deliverables individually. The overall training budget is 20K?
Charles
So the distance learning is a fraction of £20K?
I believe you said that there would be volunteer effort, but in any case, I would not expect much from such a small budget for such a difficult and technical area (that is distance learning).
That comment being written in an expectation-lowering way, and also not being within my remit to answer, I'll make some remarks. Firstly I held off sending Jon Davies any concrete and costed proposals until I had attended the "Training for Trainers": I thought it was premature. I then hit the ground running about 74 hours ago; and posted to this list as soon as I had figured out what I called the "interlocking" in my first post.
I question the assumption that money is likely to be the limiting factor in building the online community: I think "some things money can't buy" is a really good general explanation of Wikimedia's success.
And the other point is this: the genesis of this project was my unsuccessful tender to train WMUK's trainers. In it I basically suggested WMUK clone the Open University's OpenLearn project. I consulted two people associated with the OU before doing that. The OU are world leaders in distance learning. Against precedent, as I have noted, my direction is to assume we can lift and adapt what they do, conditional only on making sure that our community values are placed front and centre.
I could go on, but we don't have necessarily to buy in advice except the trainer-training. There is a Moodle community who may take it very well if WMUK endorses Moodle rather than saying someone should reverse-engineer it and write a MediaWiki extension, even if that means junking years of development of the features that educators have actually asked for. The OU possibly do not see WMUK as a rival, but as on the same side. Who knows.
Charles