Organisation Name: WikiEducator
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Web Address: http://wikieducator.org
Licenses Used: CC-BY-SA, CC-BY, public domain
Number of active initiatives: 27
Number of pages of content: 1,570
Number of page views: 791,929
Number of wiki edits: 61,524
Number of cups of coffee consumed: 4,326,711
(As of 16:02 on 26 July 2007 GMT)
Overview
WikiEducator is a project sponsored by the Commonwealth of Learning, an international NGO funded by member states of the Commonwealth of Nations. As its name would suggest, it's a wiki, and it's meant as an umbrella resource that various initiatives can use as a workbench for building open educational resources, or OERs. As a wiki that uses MediaWiki software, it has the same interface as Wikipedia.
One of several initiatives using WikiEducator is the Virtual University of Small States of the Commonwealth. VUSSC is not actually a university, but rather is a consortium of universities in small states, such as the University of the West Indies and the University of Mauritius. Among other things, VUSSC is using WikiEducator to build an undergraduate curriculum in travel and tourism that is specifically designed to address the sustainable development needs of small economies -- a curriculum unavailable from large countries whose experience development is contextually different.
Another example is the XXI Texts project, which seeks to find textbooks that have fallen into the public domain, whether from having been published sufficiently long enough ago or having not had its copyright renewed, then revise them to be useful for twenty-first century students. It's surprising how often textbooks that were published decades ago can still be sufficiently useful such that it would be much easier to adapt it for today's students than to write a new one from the start.
History
WikiEducator was instigated in early 2006 by Wayne Mackintosh, an Education Specialist with the Commonwealth of Learning, with a three phase timeline. In the first phase, from inception to the end of 2007, the focus is on establishing a democratic governance model and setting up the resources necessary so that new participants can have all of the tutorials and similar materials they need to become productive within the WikiEducator environment. The second phase is from the start to end of 2008, and consists of a focus on developing as much content as possible. The third phase is from the start of 2009 onwards, and consists of sustainability; continuing to bring in educators to add to the collection and as importantly, to use those resources already available. The ultimate goal is by 2015 to have a complete set of curricula in every discipline at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels.
Clearly, we have our work cut out for us! However, so far during the first phase we're on track. At its beginning decisions were made for WikiEducator by Dr Mackintosh. Now however, he has appointed an Interim International Advisory Board to reflect the wishes of our growing community, and once we have 2,500 registered users we will hold elections to have a properly elected International Advisory Board from then on. Meanwhile, we've added a selection of tutorial and style guides, so that those participants who start with us during the content phase will have ready guideline on how to proceed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: If it's a Commonwealth project, does that mean that WikiEducator is only meant for English language materials.
A: No, not at all! As a Commonwealth of Learning sponsored resource, English was our starting point, but we now have a French language track of WikiEducator, and are in dialogue with a number of Spanish speakers about a track for that language. We realise that the Commonwealth has enormous cultural and linguistic diversity and have every wish to respect that as we move forward with building OERs.
Q: Since WikiEducator produces OERs, under what license are those materials released?
A: Our community has developed around the Definition of Free Cultural Works. As such, all resources build on WikiEducator are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license or later (BY-SA). There has been discussion amongst some participants to change that so that initiatives working through WikiEducator would be able to release their materials in a manner compatible with BY-SA, which essentially means the less restrictive Attribution license or public domain dedication, and as of July 2007 the Board appears close to approving such a proposal.
Q: Does WikiEducator use material from Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites?
A: Unfortunately, because of the incompatibility between the copyleft provisions of the BY-SA license and the GNU Free Document License used by Wikipedia, we are as yet not able to use material from Wikipedia when building OERs on WikiEducator. However, this is a matter of great concern to both organisations, and indeed the entire OER movement, and finding a solution to allow cross-use of material is being worked on by all those concerned.
tags: international education spotlight
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