User:Jtneill/Wikiversity/Introduction

This introduction to Wikiversity is mainly written for university colleagues unfamiliar with Wikiversity, its possibilities, and its pros and cons for teaching, research, and service. Category:Wikiversity

Wikiversity as a free host
Wikiversity can function as a free host for a wide range and variety of teaching, learning, research, and outreach/service materials at any educational level. There are no upload limits or time-contraints.

Wikiversity as a champion of the open educational resources movement
Currently big publishing houses are pitted against the open educational resources movement, with both arguably in ascendency. Wikiversity offers a platform for free and open hosting of materials which can be used and reused by anyone. Such an approach to knowledge storing, sharing, and development fits the visions for emancipatory education far better than the capitalisation and commercialism of humanity's knowledge by large, commercial publishing houses.

Collegeality and collaboration
Wikiversity provides a platform for global collegeality. Connections and collaborations can be cross-institution, cross-discipline, cross-educational level, cross-language, and cross-cultural.

Scalability
Wikiversity is a sister project to Wikipedia (both supported by the Wikimedia Foundation), and thus is massively scalable, and closely integratable with not only Wikipedia content, but also Wikibooks (free textbooks), Wikisource (original, freely available texts), Wikicommons (for images, movies, etc.), Wikiquotes (quotes), and Wiktionary (dictionary). This makes it relatively easy to quickly build resources based on already existing freely available and reusable content.