Thread:Audience for proposal for WikiEducator project (1)

Hi all,

It seems to me that the best way to improve (and add to) the content on WikiEducator is to have a few students currently enrolled in "real life" versions of the courses we are offering work under a mentor as they go along. After all, who better to create material than students who actually just went through the process of learning it!? They will know best what is important and what is not important to facilitate their understanding. It is incredibly time consuming to produce/improve content in parallel with a post-college life. However, during an "in-college" life, this exercise is mutually beneficial - generating material is one of the best ways to help the student really learn the material (if you can't explain it, you don't know it!), prepare for exams, etc. At the same time, they could let WikiVersity know which topics were explained unsatisfactorily, which topics could have benefited from additional images, etc. My suggestion would be for WikiEducator to reach out to universities calling for this type of volunteer. It seems to me that it would only take one or two iterations (less than a year!) to produce some incredible material.

My thought is that rather than have lots of people randomly posting little bits of content, we should have students methodically go through the materials on WikiVersity as they are working through "brick and mortar" courses. I really believe in the idea that "teaching is the best way to learn". If a person is not enrolled in a real course, it is significant extra workload for them to create content for WikiVersity. However, if a student is taking a course, rather than spend the week before an exam staring at a book, they could be summarizing concepts, etc on WikiEducator, both helping them prepare for an exam as well as generating useful content for the world to share.

What I'm looking for is a place (forum, etc?) to get the attention of teachers across the country to ask them to keep their eyes out for students who they think would be good candidates for this type of thing and direct them to me. I am particularly interested in high school level technical topics (mathematics, physics, etc). It seems that with thousands of schools and millions of students, it should be easy to get ~5 "good ones" from every course imaginable. Then in only one or two semesters (with good mentors!), we could have an amazing foundation that could then be refined by future semesters of the same type of students.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts on this or suggestions of how to reach out to these teachers.

Daviddoria 16:21, 24 June 2010 (UTC)