Help:Resource types



Introduction
Shortcuts: Help:TYPES, Help:RT 

What kind of things are there on Wikiversity? We can start by looking briefly at other projects - both Wikimedia sister projects and the wider world of open educational resources.

Resource types in other OER initiatives
We could say that "Wikiversity does open educational resources". So what are open educational resources? All the main definitions and declarations relating to open educational resources emphasize the diversity of resource types. Unfortunately there is no complete list. This is probably because there never could be a complete list.
 * Cape Town Declaration: "course materials, lesson plans, textbooks, games, software and other materials that support teaching and learning".
 * Hewlett Packard report on OER (2007): "full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge."
 * iCommons.org: "...different types of resources, including learning content (courses, lesson plans and learning objects), tools (software that supports the development, management and re-use of content) and implementation resources (the intellectual property licences that promote open licensing and other principles of best practice)."

See also: Classifying educational resources.

Resource types on Wikiversity
Wikiversity differs from its Wikimedia sister projects in that its resources are of multiple types and highly varied. Each resource type has its own "ideal" way of being written. This makes it much more difficult to write a guide to writing the ideal Wikiversity resource than writing a guide to the ideal Wikipedia article. Resource types at Wikiversity have grown from the grass-roots level - the community of contributors has decided what they are in an extremely ad hoc fashion. The box at the top of this page contains a list of all resource types currently known about on Wikiversity.

Conventional resource types
Most of the resource types on Wikiversity have pretty straightforward or established forms. Although Wikiversity never had any formal taxonomy of resource types during its first two years of independent existence (up to 2008), contributors nevertheless tended to create resources in conformity with existing conventional patterns.

The following list draws from the list of resource types above. It describes what Wikiversitarians have in fact created during the last few years. It does not lay down a set of restrictions on resource types, but it shows you the way to build on accumulated experience and it gives you a wide range of ideas from which to choose when constructing your own resources. Note in particular the sections further down this page on experimental and new resource types.

Organizational resource types without namespaces
These organizational resource types can be said to be the main entry points for one learning resource. Learning resources on Wikiversity, when developed, are often spread over many pages and need a page to coordinate the resource. ''When tagging a page as one of these resource types, please just tag the main entry page. The sub-pages of the course (project, etc) will normally be other resource types and would require different tags.''

The main entry pages for courses, projects and workshops tend to have learning content when small or at earlier stages of development, and become largely organizational pages when more developed. The last pieces of "content" to remain in them, as they grow and expand across many subpages, are normally introductions and reading lists.

Organizational resource types with their own namespaces
Some of the highest order organizational resource types are given their own namespaces. These resource types should not directly contain any learning content.

Categorizing resource types
Resource types on this page have been categorized, rather arbitrarily, into: conventional, specialized, experimental and organizational (with intentional overlaps).

Possible further criteria for analyzing resource types:
 * the extent to which the resource type favors, combines or requires individualistic or collective approaches to editing (e.g. a blog is highly individualistic, but often leads into a subsequent collective discussion).
 * the way in which the resource type relates to the requirement for a neutral point of view - i.e. certain educational resource types, such as essays, blogs and articles, necessarily breach neutrality and need to be looked at as regards how this is controlled and declared.