Wikiversity:Assessment

Thank you for your interest in the Quality of Wikiversity. This project page is a central facility for assessing Wikiversity's content, its organization, its effectiveness as a learning/teaching community and its overall value as a free and open educational resource.

This page, like Wikiversity itself – indeed, the whole Wikimedia metacommunity (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc.) &mdash; is a work-in-progress. The idea is to develop uniform methods for assessing everything here from the quality of individual pages like lessons, learning materials and Portals to large project groups such as Schools, Divisions and Departments. The idea for this facility was first discussed at Meta-Wiki and Wikibooks, then at learning to learn a wiki way.

Your participation and input is greatly valued. A quick and easy way for you to get involved immediatly is to express your overall assessment of Wikiversity on a scale of 1 to 10 at Quality.

Assessment basics
This facility is based upon assessment methods and tools first used by Wikipedia's Version 1.0 Editorial Team. Please be patient while we adapt this system for use at Wikiversity. To get involved, please participate at Learning to learn a wiki way and join the dicussion there. 22:42, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Methods
Where Wikipedia's focus is to produce quality of content, Wikiversity's focus is to produce quality of experience. Like WikiProjects at Wikipedia, Project groups here are entities consisting of groups of contributors focused on developing content for general or specific topics. Unlike Wikipedia, which is focused mainly on encyclopedia artcles, Wikiversity must also accommodate more dynamic and diverse types of content and a deeper sense of interactivity.

The university context requires a bit more depth and scope in order to encompass not only content but the learning process as well. Assessment is thus extended to include organizational and social aspects, effectiveness, participation, appeal, aesthetics and other less tangible qualities that apply to a range of colloquial and topical elements.

Alignment
The naming conventions at Wikiversity help to align it with "real-world" colleges and universities. One of the primary goals of our self-assessment strategy is to present an organizational structure that reflects the rest of academia in a logical and general way without becoming overly rigid or conventional. Wikiversity Schools for example, are responsible for establishing Portals that allow easy navigation from the general to the specific. Subject areas should be aligned to some extent with "brick and morter" university settings.

Participation
Participation is crucial to the success and effectiveness of any educational organization. Wikiversity is a wiki – an extremely editable online resource, therefore allows a degree of participation unavailable even on many online universities. Participation is assessed by both the quantity of user-contributors and the quality of that which is contributed.

Collaboration
Learning and teaching in a group setting requires a commitment to relevance and logical integrity. Efforts can be parallel but best not duplicated. Learning group formation should be open, flexible and creative – organized but not too rigid. Context is important. Specificity is likely the key to effective communication.

Civility
As we are learning to learn a wiki way, we should all work together and get along. Wikiversity needs to be "cool".

Content
Wikiversity content pages and sets of pages are assessed similarly to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 methods.