*
WikiEducator is an international online community project for the collaborative development of learning materials, which educators are free to reuse, adapt and share without restriction. WikiEducator was launched in 2006 and is supported by the non-profit
Open Education Resource Foundation (OER).
A variety of learning resources are available on WikiEducator: direct instructional resources such as lesson plans and full courses, as well as learning-support resources, such as individual school portals and funding proposals.
WikiEducator's stated goal is to build a thriving and sustainable global community dedicated to the design, development and delivery of free content for learning in realisation of a free version of the education curriculum by 2015. The project purports to focus on building capacity in the use of
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWi ...
and related free software technologies, developing free content for use in educational institutions and elsewhere, facilitating the establishment of community networks and collaboration, and fostering new technologies.
History
Wayne Mackintosh created the prototype of WikiEducator on a desktop machine, making the very first edit on 13 February 2006. He registered the WikiEducator domain name on 12 February 2006 in
New Zealand
New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...
. In April 2006, the prototype was moved onto a hosted server with the financial assistance of
Commonwealth of Learning
The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is an intergovernmental organisation of The Commonwealth headquartered in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Working collaboratively with governmental and nongovernmental organizations and other institu ...
(COL). COL provided sponsorship and leadership for the project, including receipt of a $100,000 grant from
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to develop WikiEducator. On 1 July 2009, WikiEducator became an independent entity, headquartered at the new International Centre for Open Education at
Otago Polytechnic
Otago Polytechnic was a public New Zealand tertiary education institute, centred in Dunedin with additional campuses in Cromwell and Auckland. Otago Polytechnic provided career-focused education and training, offering a range of New Zealand accr ...
in
Dunedin
Dunedin ( ; mi, Ōtepoti) is the second-largest city in the South Island of New Zealand (after Christchurch), and the principal city of the Otago region. Its name comes from , the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. Th ...
, New Zealand.
While COL continues to provide some financial support for WikiEducator, the Open Education Resource Foundation maintains the technical and operational infrastructure of the WikiEducator community in accordance with the policies approved by the WikiEducator Community Council.
Participant training
WikEducator's training programme is called Learning4Content (L4C). Under this initiative, the WikiEducator project arranges free face-to-face as well as online wiki skills and OER development trainings. In return for participants' pledge to develop a learning resource on the wiki, the WikiEducator community supports them in their journey to acquire wiki editing skills and to experience the peer-based model for developing OERs. The WikiEducator community will also certify new WikiEducators who request certification of their skills under the L4C initiative.
Recognition
WikiEducator was the inaugural recipient of the MERLOT Africa Network's award for exemplary open educational resources (OERs) practices in 2008.
See also
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Wikiversity
Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project that supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from Wikipedia in that it offers tutorials and other materials for the fostering of learning, rather ...
References
External links
*{{official website, http://www.wikieducator.org
Distance education
Education International
MediaWiki websites
Internet properties established in 2006