[Wikiversity-l] free online degrees?

[Robert Horning]

Teemu Leinonen wrote:
> Ray et all,
>
> Ray Saintonge kirjoitti 2.5.2007 kello 20:17:
>   
>> Why should Wikiversity be a servant of the employers?  If the  
>> employers
>> want to maximize the value of their enterprise.  By providing such
>> guarantees for employers Wikiversity would adopt the values of the
>> employers, and become caught up in their partucular yuppie rat-race.
>>     
>
> Exactly. This is why I pointed out what are the degrees really for  
> and about. With this I was trying to make it clear that they are not  
> very much according to the idea of "Free Learning Community",  
> academy, popular education or free school.
>
> Still, I do not mind if taking studies on Wikiversity will make some  
> people more competence in a labor market.
>   
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.


>> Even if it were to concede that as a good thing, who would accept the
>> responsibility of all the administrivia that it involves?  I doubt  
>> that
>> it would be an enlightening use of volunteer time.  If we pay  
>> someone to
>> do this the entire character of the project would change.
>>     
>
> 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.
>
>   
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.

>> For some employers beiing into new things would suggest someone who is
>> chronically unable to focus on the task at hand, and thus not a
>> productive employee.  There are jobs where innovation is an asset, but
>> they are a minority.
>>     
>
> You are right again. Depending on the job you are applying for, you  
> may or may not add your Wikipedia courses in your CV. if you are  
> looking for a job from my research group, please do. :-)
>
> 	- Teemu
>   

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