User:Randyfisher/WE Intro

Working DRAFT
Hi,

One thought I have is how WikiEducator can support:
 * 1) community engagement and rapid project implementation in a way that is sustainable AND scalable
 * 2) reducing the time and expense associated with developing quality educational resources, while enabling sharing, modification and re-use.

Here's a link to WikiEducator - http://www.wikieducator.org. Our vision is to create a free and open version of the world's education curriculum by 2015. WE was a project of the Commonwealth of Learning - http://www.col.org, but has outgrown the home nest - with 11,000 active educators around the globe and a top 90,000 website. I'm on the governing council. http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Randyfisher

As of April 2009, WikiEducator has moved to an independent, nonprofit entity, called the International Centre for Open Education / Open Education Resource (OER) Foundation - co-located with Otago Polytechnic in NZ. http://www.wikieducator.org/WikiEducator:OER_Foundation

We're always interested in pilot projects - http://www.wikieducator.org/Pilot_Projects -- to strengthen relationships and develop internal use cases. Our approach involves incorporating participatory action research - including a learning system ecology approach to support meaningful and continuous project involvement, feedback and mutual learning among all stakeholders and communities

A great example is a project that brought together experts in HIV AIDS Treatment Literacy and Community Radio practitioners in Africa - http://www.wikieducator.org/HIVAIDS_Portal/LearnShare_HIVAIDS_Africa (My colleague Gurmit Singh, from the International AIDS Society was instrumental in making this project a success - I've cc'd him on this note.)

We're supported by a generous grant from the Hewlett Foundation to offer free wiki skills training (via the Learning4Content project - http://www.wikieducator.org/Learning4Content). Over the past 18 months, we've trained 3,500 educations from 110 countries -- using a very cost-effective delivery model.

In terms of 'technical information, Athabasca University in Canada hosts our servers, the Commonwealth of Learning supports our infrastructure, and we have relationships with tertiary, secondary, K-12 and vocational institutions from around the world. Our discussion group: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator

By December 2009, we will be implementing Rich Text Editing which will help us scale growth by an order of magnitude.


 * Inception date: Feb 2006
 * Registered users: 11,400 (September 16, 2009)
 * Alexa traffic rankings (3 month average Aug 09): 85,282 compared with 192,166 (Aug 08) – we have spiked at 23,403!
 * Returning visitors: Currently 18% of our global traffic. We have approximately 20,000 returning visits per month. Returning visitors spend 10.26 minutes/visit on the site and visit approximately 10 pages per visit.

Unlike the open public wikis -- we have a very focused educational audience. 73% of our registered users are lecturers, teachers or trainers working in the formal education sector. 50% are from tertiary and about 25% from K12.

Please do take a look at these links, and let me know if you have would like to chat about how WikiEducator can help you achieve your goals.

Best regards,

- Randy

from Randy
... coming soon...

from Gurmit
...coming soon...


 * Sustainable Knowledge & Skills Transfer