General briefing on WikiEducator progress for the 2nd WCC Meeting

Vital Statistics

• WikiEducator has achieved 11,000 registered users compared with 5,941 when the results of the Community Council Election were announced in September 2008.
• WikiEducator has administered the Learning4Content project, the worlds largest attempt to develop wiki skills for education. With generous funding support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Commonwealth of Learning, over the last 18 months WikiEducator has:
  • Recruited 3001 educators from 113 different countries for wiki skills training
  • Scheduled 86 workshops (that's an average of more than 1 workshop per week!)
  • Increased the volume of OER content in WikiEducator by 270%
  • Report is available for download
• The WikiEducator community is actively engaged with the development of a number of policy proposals including workgroups for: Constituting community workgroups, Style guidelines and Administrators in preparation for the upcoming Council meeting.

OER Foundation

The Open Education Resource Foundation (OERF) is an independent, not-for-profit organisation that provides leadership, networking and support for educators and educational institutions to achieve their objectives through Open Education. The OERF was formerly registered on the 28th day of April 2009 under the New Zealand Companies Act of 1993, and is restricted to charitable education purposes. The establishment and objectives of the OER Foundation Limited were approved by resolution of the Council of Otago Polytechnic and offices are located at Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin. The OERF is responsible for raising and administering funding to support the adoption and implementation of open education resources for the benefit of education institutions and the learner communities they serve. The OERF is responsible for maintaining the technical and operational infrastructure of the WikiEducator community in accordance with the policies approved by the WikiEducator Community Council.

Progress to date

• OERF strategy is under development and receiving comments.
• WikiEducator servers will be hosted at Athabasca University, Canada's premier online university. Migration is under way and we anticipate testing of the new environment late September / October 2009 before going live.
• Funding:
  • The Hewlett Foundation have awarded the OERF US$200,000 to achieve content interoperability between the Connexions and Mediawiki platforms including funding support for continuing the Learning4Content training initiative for the next 2 years.
  • The OERF is collaborating with the New Zealand Ministry of Education, Catalyst and local teachers to establish a national OER commons (OERNZ) for the school sector using WikiEducator. The project aims to build capability, improve usability of Mediawiki for teachers and seed OER content development - NZ$112,000.
  • The Commonwealth of Learning is providing financial support to the OER Foundation to assist with the costs of hosting the WikiEducator servers -- CAD$50,000 over the next three years.
  • Athabasca University is making a significant contribution in kind towards the hosting of the WikiEdcuator project.
  • OERF will commence a recruitment drive for founding institutional members incorporating a number of membership categories.
  • OERF will launch a public donation campaign to support our charitable work and growth of the WikiEducator project.