User:Remi/Archives/Recommendations to Wikiversity

In the following we are presenting five recommendations for the Wikiversity community, building them from the bases of free and liberal education's tradition.

Wikiversity should have clear "study offering". In the spirit of the free education the "study offering" should be fully designed and defined by the community members. The study offering should reflect the needs of the community, and the members of the community should have a right to propose "study projects". To have study offering, all the study projects offered by the Wikiversity should meet some minimum requirement of structure. Each of them should provide teachers/leaders, schedule, registration, syllabus, objectives, means of evaluation and feedback. This would require also some general scheduling for the Wikiversity, such as semesters and fixed starting and finishing dates. Even if education is free and liberal it requires a certain level of commitment from the participants. People must be committed to spend their time and to commit to the objectives of the "study projects".

Wikiversity community should be active in recognizing groups that would most benefit of it and encourage them to utilize Wikiversity. Wikiversity should be proactive in this by promoting itself among groups with low socio-cultural-economical and political freedoms in local and global context. In tradition of free and liberal education the focus has been on those who have less favorable combination of circumstances in the life and in the society. Free and liberal eduction considers itself as a mean for people to reach better social, cultural, and economical position. Similar way as free and liberal education has served the social change in the 20 century's national states, such as in Nordic countries, Wikiversity could server the social change in the 21 century's globalized world. Wikiversity should aim to find solutions to the challenges of its time, similar way as the free and liberal education was part of the solution to build more equal, fear and free societies.

Wikiversity should have an organization that is serving the study offering. It could mean some new roles, which the community members should be free to take depending on what they are doing in the different study programs offered on Wikiversity. One should be able to be a student, teacher, researcher or administrator in different situations. One should be able to have multiple roles in different activities taking place in the Wikiversity: be a teacher in one study program, student in another one and administrator in a third. Democracy and flexibility are some of the core ideas behind the free and liberal education. In free schools each student, teacher and parent have an equal right to speak in the school meetings. If there are competing proposals for decisions each will also have one vote. Flexibility in free and liberal education means that teacher is open to see himself as a learner, too. Students may also take a role of being a teacher. To enrich the learning experience a free school may also use some of the parents as teachers in some situations.

Wikiversity should focus on people and less on content. As pointed out earlier, probably the most fundamental change for the wiki-community. with the strong vision and commitment on content production – is that in the Wikiversity the focus should be more on people and communication, and less on content and wiki-site. From the wiki-platform it would require more advanced communication tools. Wiki discussion pages and IRC are good, but not enough. Integration of free/libre VoIP online conference tools to the wiki-platform would open it for such a group work we people are "hard-coded." The VoIP online conference tool could also result as much higher level of belonging and group cohesion. In free and liberal education one of the most common form of learning is a "study circle". Study circle is a form of learning where a small group of people meet to discuss about topics they are interested in to learn about. The focus in a study circle is to explore and inquiry the topics, not simply socializing. Often study circles are using some reference materials, such as a text book or audio/visual material, to simulate the discussion. The aim of the study circle is to improve the participants understanding of the topics discusses.

Wikiversity's main library should be the content found from the other Wiki-project sites. The change of focus from the content to people would also clear up the relationship of Wikiversity with the other projects of the Foundation. In the Wikiversity's study projects the "neutral education content" found from the Wikibooks, Wikipedia and Wikispecies would be the primary learning materials. The other Foundation projects would in practice be the "library" of the Wikiversity. In some more advantaged studies in the Wikiversity, student could also contribute their study results to other projects of the Foundation. An important part of free and liberal education ecosystem is free press/media and libraries offering access to different kind of reference materials. People involved in free and liberal adult education are often also the heavy users of public libraries. Some free and liberal education institutions also maintain their own libraries and have publications to support their study offering.

Source
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Free_education_and_free_school%3F