User:Jtneill/Presentations/Wikiversity for teaching, learning, and research

Wikiversity for teaching, learning, and research

James T. Neill
University of Canberra

Wikimedia Australia "Using Wikimedia in Higher Education" Webinar
Thursday 28 November 2024, Online

Slides
(Google)

Abstract

The Wikimedia Foundation's mission is to make the sum of human knowledge freely available for all. Although Wikipedia is well known, it is only for encyclopedic information. The Wikimedia Foundation has other sister projects for other purposes. For example, Wikiversity provides an optimal, wiki-based platform for development and sharing of open educational resources. Wikiversity can be edited by anyone, including educators and students, making it an excellent platform for student-staff collaboration. Wikiversity can also be used for research.

Bio

James is an Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University of Canberra. James is a keen proponent of open educational practices and use of wikis for curriculum development and student learning projects.

Values

Arguably the highest value for academics is to contribute as openly as possible to the knowledge commons. Academics are fundamentally employed by public institutions to broker knowledge and support the education of society and its citizens.

However, academics are vulnerable to becoming institutionalised and operating largely within walled gardens and ivory towers. For example, it is easy to default to minimal sharing of knowledge through paywalled journals and locked learning management systems. This means that most citizens are unable to access much higher education knowledge.

Personally, I strive to practice open academia. This means sharing teaching, research, and service materials as openly and flexibly as possible. Ideally, this means using:

• open licensing
• open formats
• open governance/decision-making

Wikis

Wikis are the earliest and simplest openly editable webpages. Wiki wiki is a Hawaiian term for quick. Wikis allow open communities to collaboratively construct and share information.

Wikimedia Foundation

The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation hosts a rich ecosystem of wiki-based sister projects which include Wikipedia for encyclopedic information and Wikiversity for education. Each of these projects is multi-lingual, with different instances for each language.

Sister projects

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) hosts a diverse ecosystem of multilingual free and open wiki projects.

Most people are somewhat familiar with Wikipedia but are much less aware of the other projects.

A WMF user account is universal, so it works across all wikis and languages.

There are 15 sister projects, including Wikipedia. They run on open-source MediaWiki software.

Each sister project has a specific purpose and focus.

For example, most people are familiar with:

• Wikipedia, which is a wiki for encyclopedic information, but they are typically much less familiar with other projects such as
• Wikibooks (for authoring free books e.g., a textbooks),
• Wikispecies (for flora and fauna taxonomic information),
• Wiktionary (for definitions, synonyms etc.,),
• Wikinews (for news),
• Wikimedia Commons (for images, audio, video etc)

What these projects offer are free, online organisations of information and knowledge that anyone can create, edit, and comment on.

Together, the sister projects provide more than the sum of their parts because they work together synergistically.

Wikiversity

The Wikiversity mission is to provide free and open teaching, learning, and research materials. Unlike, Wikipedia, original research is permitted.

Collectively, Wikiversity consists of:

• ~150,000 pages in 17 languages (plus a multi-lingual hub for other languages)
• ~800 active users
• ~50 administrators (unpaid, volunteer)

Welcome Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning. We invite teachers, students, and researchers to join us in creating open educational resources and collaborative learning communities. To learn more about Wikiversity, try a guided tour, learn about adding content, or start editing now.

Teaching

Wikiversity can be used to host teaching materials, including lecture/tutorial/workshop notes.

Learning

Students can also edit and contribute to Wikiversity (e.g., for learning and assessment exercises) (e.g., Motivation and emotion/Book).

Research

Original research is not allowed on Wikipedia; it is allowed (and encouraged) on Wikiversity. This research can range from informal to formal peer-reviewed (e.g., see WikiJournals)

Example

In the 3rd year undergraduate psychology unit, Motivation and emotion, at the University of Canberra, ~150 students per year learn how to collaboratively author 4,000 word online book chapters. To date, over 1,500 chapters have been created:

Browse the book

Each chapter tackles a unique topic and includes learning features such as:

• Links
• Images
• Tables
• Quizzes etc.

For more information about the principles and practices of this Wikiversity project, see:

Neill, J. T. (2024). Collaborative authoring using wiki: An open education case study. International Journal of Students as Partners, 8(1), 224–232. https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v8i1.5417

Neill, J. T. (2024). Wikis provide a rich environment for collaborative open educational practices: Motivation and emotion case study]. In Open Education Down UndOER: Australiasian case studies. Council of Australian University Librarians.