College of the Rockies

College of the Rockies & WikiEducator: possible project with BCcampus

Planning page
David Porter provides us with some direction, guidelines for what a collaborative project with BCcampus should be; i.e. "have (a) clear beginning and end, and have a pre-defined plan of action to deal with outcomes – positive (implement, refine, extend) or negative (review, report, nuke)"

The story so far...

It has been a very busy start-up session for those of us who work in academia in the Northern Hemisphere. I have done some preliminary talking with faculty members at College of the Rockies (COTR) about the possibilities of making curriculum freely available through WikiEducator. The faculty I have consulted have hinted that we will have 2 unique stakeholder groups at the institutional level:
 * the faculty, who may or may not be willing to share their work, and
 * the management, who may or may not be willing to share college curriculum products

It occurs to me that we may have to open a discussion about looking at our created curriculum as not just/only "products" but as contributions to the Common Good. Looking at created curriculum as a product maintains the vision of academia as business; looking at it as part of the Common Good enhances the vision of academia as force for global development.

My next step, at least, will be to open a conversation about this with my own manager. I hope to be able to report on this over the next 2 weeks.

G. Bennett