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Wikiversity
URL	http://www.wikiversity.org/
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Educational, self study
Registration	Optional
Available language(s)	Multilingual
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Wikimedia Community

Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project^[1], which supports learning communities, ad hoc teams, their learning materials, and resulting activities. Wikiversity's beta phase officially began on August 15, 2006 with the English language Wikiversity. There are currently five language Wikiversities - English, French, German, Italian and Spanish - and new language Wikiversity projects in other languages are in development at the "beta" multilingual hub.

Wikiversity is in development as a center for the creation and use of free learning materials, and the provision of learning activities. Its primary priorities and goals are to:

• Create and host a range of free-content, multilingual learning materials/resources, for all age groups in all languages
• Host scholarly/learning projects and communities that support these materials^[2]

The Wikiversity e-Learning model places emphasis on "learning groups" and "learning by doing". Wikiversity's motto and slogan is "set learning free".^[3][4] The idea is that these groups/communities of Wikiversity participants engage in learning projects. Learning is through collaboration on projects that are detailed, outlined, summarized or results reported by editing Wikiversity pages. Wikiversity learning projects include collections of wiki webpages concerned with the exploration of a particular topic.^[5] Wikiversity participants can (and do) express their learning goals and the Wikiversity community collaborates to develop learning activities and projects to accommodate those goals.

Learning resources are developed by an individual or groups, either on their own initiative, or as part of a learning project. Wikiversity resources include teaching aids, lesson plans, curricula, links to off-site resources, course notes, example and problem sets, computer simulations, reading lists, and other as devised by participants - but do not include final polished textbooks. Texts useful to others are hosted at Wikibooks for update and maintenance.^[6] Learning groups with interests in each subject area create a web of resources that form the basis of discussions and activities at Wikiversity. Learning resources can be used by educators outside of Wikiversity for their own purposes, under the terms of the GFDL (like Wikipedia).

For newly established specific language Wikiversitys to move out of the initial exploratory "beta" phase, the new Wikiversity community must establish policies governing research activities. Wikiversity may act as a repository of research carried out by the Wikimedia Research Network, or others who are involved in wiki-based, or other research. Wikiversity hosts original research in addition to secondary research, unless a specific language group decides upon no research. It is expected that researchers will respect and update guidelines for appropriate research through a community consensus process.^[7][8]

Wikinews has related news:

Wikimedia Netherlands 2007 conference held on wikis and education

• OpenLearn - a project of Open University to deliver free educational resources

• The Wikiversity multilingual portal - with links to all Wikiversity sites.
• The English language Wikiversity (in beta phase)
• Wikiversity Gains Momentum at PC World
• Article at The Chronicle of Higher Education
• [1] Nautilus, blog for past and future Nature Publishing Group Journals.
• "Resources for Professional Development"[2] Prepared for the Fall conference of the Missouri Juvenile Justice Association, October—2006, Office of State Courts Administrator, Division of Judicial Education P48.