User:Cormaggio/Issues for Wikiversity

I'm trying here to outline issues that we need to work on as a community. Please feel free to add to this list if you find this page - or add questions and/or suggestions here or on the talk page..

General issues

 * Structuring of resources, ie Namespaces (is our structure easy enough to use or complicated enough to drive people away?)
 * Metadata (what exactly do we need from it?)
 * Pedagogy
 * What is a course?
 * How would we make our pedagogic styles explicit (eg Disclosures and Science teaching materials for creationism)?
 * Research (of course) - how is this to be facilitated and managed?
 * Content - should we have guidelines for what kind of content we would disallow? (eg "Bombmaking 101")
 * "Cheating"
 * Examples of good courses. "The other *massive* thing that I think we need to focus on is how to start being explicit about building a model of learning on Wikiversity, and to be explicit about the types of learning that we are working within on existing pages." — Cormaggio in private correspondence.
 * Student cohorts. I'll articulate the problem, I'm sure there's an answer but at the moment don't know what it is.


 * I've been exploring, looking for "examples of good courses" above. I've already struck two which are organized around the premise of a group of students working together. However, Wikiversity by its nature is open ended. There's no "official" start of school, no conventional way of defining a cohort of students. Would be students are arriving all the time and naturally assuming they can begin any course right now.


 * By their nature very appropriate for some courses, but not others. For instance the Third Reich course which is premised around class discussion of that week's reading assignments which move students progressively through a body of literature. Very conventional organization, but problematic in the Wikiversity environment. (Haven't had feedback from the organizer as yet). Another is the Film School project which is premised on students collectively building a film together. Essentially the same problem.


 * Which highlights the need to provide guidance on crafting a course for Wikiversity. The best way to do that, I think, would be to review what's already on the site, learn from our course providers as to what's working and spread the good word, provide a helping hand up. — morley 21:14, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
 * One may encourage to every course organiser to write half a page of short summary ( < 200 words ) on what her course has achieved, and some record keepers can collect them and keep them together in some wikiversity: page.--Hillgentleman|User talk:hillgentleman 07:05, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Community issues

 * Featured participants - is this a good idea? How might it be beneficial and how might it be harmful?
 * Subcommunities (ie specific learning communities) - how autonomous would they be?
 * Teachers - again, how autonomous are they?

Technical issues
(Note: some of this has been suggested by the KDE developer community - as well as others)
 * Login - do we need some sort of differential login for "teachers" and "students"?
 * I'd say no, at least for now. Designations of who is a "teacher" or "instructor" will likely grow organically by simply noting who has taken responsibility for leading an online course. My intuition suggests watching what develops organically and respond to needs as they appear. In other words, don't anticipate. morley 17:28, 25 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Metadata (again)
 * Structuring of courses - how can this be best developed?
 * support for video and multimedia file formats; are we stuck with just OGG? Could there be a Wikimedia FOundation server for other media formats such as podcasting?