Robert Horning kirjoitti 3.5.2007 kello 14:19:
I would have to disagree with both points above, to a certain extent. The point of trying to appeal to the interests of "employers" is to provide an economically viable system for sustaining an effort like Wikiversity without having to resort to advertising or constantly having donation pledge drives. While it is nice to live in a utopian society where we can do things just because there is some positive social value to accomplish a given task, there are hard economic realities to operating a site like Wikiversity that can't be ignored.
You are right. There are hard economic realities but I think we should aim to find more creative solutions than simply copying or adapting to the model of "selling degrees". Instead of this I would look for private-public partnerships where the social and wider economical value of the Wikiversity is seen so hight that the money will come.
There have been several WMF projects in the past which have used direct grants from various organizations (with for-profit companies as a possibility) to help pay for various sub-projects. In educational environments, it isn't unknown to even make a legitimate business case to a for-profit corporation to provide educational experiences of some sort within an educational institution. I think it would be reasonable to discuss under what sort of circumstances such a corporate sponsorship would be considered reasonable and what would otherwise be considered "selling out".
I do not have anything against corporate sponsorship. However, I would at first make an appeal to corporations' social responsibility.
As can be seen with the Essjay incident on Wikipedia, an altruistic attitude on this is not going to be sufficient here. Some legitimate standards need to be established that go well beyond "yeah, I read through the material on this topic, and played around with the tests". How those standards are established is something of another thread and discussion, but there is a real need for hard standards that can be universally applied before somebody can claim to have completed a Wikiversity curriculum study experience. Claims to have completed something like this will have no value at all until you can demonstrate this knowledge and have that somehow certified.
I think ihn the Essjay incident there was not much to report. Wikipedia is based on trust and tolerance and so should Wikiversity. I do not see why in the Wikiversity there should be any "hard standards that can be universally applied". We naturally must aim to have "high standards" but they should be aimed to achieve with the wiki community effort.
In Wikiversity there will be courses with different quality. We may try to showcase those which the community considers to be high quality and this way pull up those that are not that good. We could also have some practice of "quality control" so that people who have took some course could evaluate (vote?) whatever the course should be included to some list of "high quality courses".
A course where you "read through the material on a topic, and play around with the tests" should never make it to the list.
Mind you, this is the reason why a degree is valued. It is a document that demonstrates somebody has obtained a certain amount of knowledge, and the educational institution who grants the degree is certifying that the person who holds the degree has in fact been examined to possess the knowledge represented by the degree. While there may be sometimes professional certification exams as well (like a professional engineer exam or a bar exam), quite often the degree is considered as valuable if not more so than the professional exam itself. Particularly when the degree is from a prestigious institution who has made efforts to keep their standards high.
Right. The aim of the Wikiversity should be "a prestigious institution who has made efforts to keep their standards high". Only this way the studies taken in the Wikiversity can be seen valuable.
While we may not call them "degrees" as such, I don't see why Wikiversity can't establish some sort of academic standard for students who wish to have their knowledge about a topic certified to some extent. It doesn't have to (at the moment) be a full baccalaureate program, but some sort of independently verifiable knowledge mastery and demonstration should be done other than somebody's personal claims on their user page.
I think the "high standard course" (or whatever it should be called) list will do this. If your course in your user page are all from the list, good for you. If they are all some "read and click tests" courses, clever people will get the point.
I also hope that eventually Wikiversity learning experiences will also be considered valuable enough that they will be mentioned on CV/resumes. I would certainly look favorably at hiring individuals who have participated in a significant fashion with Wikimedia projects, if only as a demonstration for how well they can get along with people from different cultures and philosophical backgrounds.
Exactly. I guess this is what we are practicing here right now.
- Teemu
----------------------------------------------- Teemu Leinonen http://www.uiah.fi/~tleinone/ +358 50 351 6796 Media Lab http://mlab.uiah.fi University of Art and Design Helsinki -----------------------------------------------