User:JWSchmidt/Blog/20 January 2007

I worked on converting two more portals to the editable box format: Portal:Education and Portal:Physical Sciences.

Courses
From the perspective of "learning projects", conventional courses are are an important type of "learning project" and one that Wikiversity participants should be concerned about. I think the Board of Trustees wanted the Wikiversity community to not give conventional courses a high priority right at the launch of the Wikiversity project. That said, any Wikipedia participants who really do want to develop a conventional course should do so. My guess is that in most cases the best way to develop a conventional course at Wikiversity is to start some wiki editing projects that aim to develop the course. We can always launch a "course" in the form of a discussion group and a search for good sources of information about the topic. If we attract participants who are interested in the topic, they will work to accumulate the learning resources that are needed to explore the topic. With a bit of time it will probably be possible to run a conventional course using the assembled resources. However, I suspect that Wikiversity will also have created a new and innovative online learning environment for the topic that will be superior to conventional courses. If so, most Wikiversity participants will no longer be interested in conventional courses.

See: Portal:Wiki Scholar and User:JWSchmidt/Wiki Scholar.