On 4/30/07, Michael Wehrle <mwehrle(a)gmail.com> wrote: members as I am new to wikiversity. Are free online degrees through wikiversity in the works? And if not, why not? What is keeping them from being able to offer completely free online degrees? It's not really been too heavily discussed; however, at present time Wikiversity is simply way, way, way too immature for us to even consider becoming a degree-granting institution. Perhaps some day in the future, but by no means at this time. -- Daniel Cannon (AmiDaniel) http://amidaniel.com cannon.danielc(a)gmail.com _______________________________________________ Wikiversity-l mailing list Wikiversity-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiversity-l

Pedro Sanchez wrote: I don't believe that was ever stated, although there were many opposed to the Wikiversity concept in the beginning because this could be seen as a diploma mill as opposed to a legitimate learning center.

And this is something that must be fought against even if some sort of arrangement to offer high school or college credits (or even "CEU" credits) is ever developed that would be recognized through some sort of legitimate accrediation body. The standards needed to offer legitimate degrees are high enough that we shouldn't be deceiving anybody while Wikiversity is starting out that such degrees are going to be granted any time soon, if ever. I did come across a legitimate educational institution a while back that wanted to co-sponsor an on-line learning experience through Wikiversity, where this other organization would be offering the actual educational credits and accreditation. I don't know how much follow-through happened on the idea, but it is something that has happened (they came to us, not the other way around BTW) and may happen in the future in other situations.

I would also have to say for myself that I would feel very uncomfortable before even educational credits of some sort are offered (even in a joint setting) without some sort of formal discussion happening about it not only on the Collequium, but also with the WMF board getting involved as well to formalize the arrangement. And for the standards to be very clear about what would be needed by both the participants as well as those who are setting up the instruction.

There is quite a bit we can do before we need to reach these much higher standards for much more informal learning experiences, such as is already happening on Wikiversity. Even if a (very) long term goal is to eventually reach the ability to offer a degree program. I would expect that it will take some time, meaning many years of effort, before we are going to even offer academic credits of any kind. -- Robert Horning

Hello Michael, I'll pop my head up on this one and risk the heavy handed come backs that seem to get dealt in these forums... I work for an educational institution. We specialise in vocational training, trades education and some degrees. I saw a potential with wikiversity and wikieducator where by we would offer up our training and educational resources to the wiki platforms, perhaps benefit from others editing it, translating it, extending it.. perhaps not. Main thing is that we had our resources out there for others to access and use, and for our students to access and use. In my trial of Wikiversity, I started putting contact details for the facilitators we use for the course materials we put up. This was intended as a way for people to make contact with others who could help them with their studies. Of course, wikis being wikis - other people are able to put their contact details in as well, and there we would be creating a teaching and learning network around topic areas. Premise being, content is one thing, contact is where learning is enriched. Unfortunately, listing contact details was seen as promotional activity on the wiki and was criticised by some Wikiversity people. I think this was because some of those contact details were associated with our educational institution - thus promoting our educational institution.

My own personal take on free online degrees is that it is completely unrealistic to be expecting to do this self-sufficiently - however, creating partnerships with accredited institutions that would grant degrees (or some sort of credit) for work done in Wikiversity could be a realistic option.

My understanding was that wikiversity would not itself "grant" degrees. Rather the degree "granting" would be thru a proxy, and the coursework via another proxy. For example, a technical/science degree program via wikiversity could have something like the online branch of Thomas Edison State College of New Jersey be the proxy to grant a degree, and the coursework provider could be MIT. Thus, wikiversity itself neither provides coursework nor degrees, rather, via proxys such as in this example, it could, hypothetically, "facillitate", rather than "grant" degrees. Does this sound more or less correct in terms of the general approach to degrees with wikiversity? Frank Erdman

Summary: I would like to see some kind of "recognition" system / practice in the Wikiversity. It could be a simple list of Wikiversity course each user has took with links to the course pages and course work. This way people could use their "Wikiversity portfolio / CV" also when they are looking for a job. The employer / person hiring may then decide what value she gives for the "Wikiversity courses".

How many of the people on this list know how to fish with simple equipment available for less than 50 € cents all around the world?

Also we shouldn't forget the basic skills and knowledge that are very valuable for majority of people in the world just as a such. Examples: Learning to fish or farm will brings food in your table, learning to build a shelter will give you a place to live at

I pretty much agree with all the others in the list, but would still like to open up a bit the concept of "degree", and think how Wikiversity could respond it its own way? <- Reading instructions: in academy, popular education and free schools there are "recognitions" which the community awards for its community members. No degrees, nor certifications, nor accreditation.

So, then back to the concept of "degree". Here are some questions: Why are there degrees? 1) To guarantee for the employers that the degree holders can do a certain job 2) To guarantee for the educational institutions goods with a value in the markets

In addition to these there are jobs for what you need a license to practice (in most parts of the world): medical doctors and other medical professionals, lawyers, teachers teaching children, policemen, military etc. I assume that it is not realistic to aim to give "degree programs" on these topics in the Wikiversity, *but there are many other topics we may include to the Wikiversity offering and even give recognitions to each other when someone has made a good job in some course*.

Summary: I would like to see some kind of "recognition" system / practice in the Wikiversity. It could be a simple list of Wikiversity course each user has took with links to the course pages and course work. This way people could use their "Wikiversity portfolio / CV" also when they are looking for a job. The employer / person hiring may then decide what value she gives for the "Wikiversity courses".

As a person also hiring people once in a while, I would actually right now value pretty high "Wikiversity courses" in someone's CV. For me they (at the moment) tell that the person is into new things, active, capable and willing to learn new things etc.

Ray Saintonge kirjoitti 2.5.2007 kello 20:17: I do not see here any extra administrative work involved. You simply write the courses you have took in the Wikiversity in your user page with links to the course pages. You just build your own "Wikiversity study record" on your own user page. All based on trust and transparency. Shit will happen but I am pretty sure that the benefits of openness are greater than if having some "reliable record keeping body" working on this.

Teemu Leinonen wrote: 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. Things like network bandwidth, server equipment, and professional staff (aka via the WMF for all this) don't come cheap, even if we are sharing these costs with other WMF sister projects. 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". Note that I'm not trying to suggest we should bend over backwards and structure all Wikiversity projects around a corporate model, but we shouldn't be dismissing these kind of opportunities out of hand either. It has always been a struggle to find some sort of self-sustaining economic model for content developers of free/open source content and software. And frankly most people involved with the free content movement (free as in freedom as well as beer) do a very lousy job of thinking through the economics of the situation. Regardless of even if there is nearly 100% voluntary contributions in terms of the actual content that is developed, you still have economic costs that must somehow be dealt with that are usually ignored completely. I will note here that one of the reasons I thought Wikiversity would be a good fit with the WMF sister projects is that Wikiversity would have a chance to develop until a mature economic model could develop, as I've seen most other on-line "free" educational groups reach a point very quickly where they had to find some way to pay for the physical network requirements to operate such an environment. And usually those organizers didn't realize the actual demands until well after bandwidth capabilities were being exceeded or the 5 year old surplus computer they were using for hosting the project simply couldn't sustain the requirements of the project. Often these kind of on-line educational communities were a "hobby" that somebody had some surplus bandwidth, so they decided to donate some surplus stuff they had to see if the idea might be something useful, but only to realize the project growth quickly dominated the other more "legitimate" reasons for having the network bandwidth in the first place. Jimbo Wales even suffered from this problem, where he did precisely the same thing in regards to Wikipedia. He had his own for-profit company (Bomis) that had some surplus bandwidth to sustain Wikipedia and Nupedia, only to discover that Wikipedia became so popular that it blew away his commercial bandwidth needs. At least in this situation the WMF has already gone through this difficult transition period successfully, and there are attempts to try and compensate for the economic issues involved. This boils down to certification of credentials, under various meanings of that term. The point of having a "registrar" or something similar to that would be a way to have any such claims on user pages to be verified to confirm if they in fact actually happened. It is one thing to claim to have written a particular Wikibook or Wikipedia article (which can also be independently verified), but to have claimed to have completed a given course of study implies that you have met some sort of criteria and that you have somehow "proven" that you have obtained the knowledge about that particular subject. 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. 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. 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 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. -- Robert Horning _______________________________________________ Wikiversity-l mailing list Wikiversity-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiversity-l