WikiSchool

This is a proposal for a new Wikimedia sister project.

WikiSchool
Status of the proposal
Status	rejected
Reason	Could be in Wikiversity.

WikiSchool will provide free online access to primary and secondary school education via video classroom modules for each subject and year.

The basic idea is to digitally capture a year of schoolroom teaching at each grade level, and then post that on the web for all to access. WikiSchool will be the platform for organizing, accessing, and rating that content.

Proposed by

1. Sansmap (talk)

Mission

WikiSchool will make education accessible to anyone with a PC and internet access.

Concept Details

Each year, educational content is created millions of times across the country and the globe, but it disappears once it has been created (except in the minds of the students), and the next year it happens all over again. The goal of this project is to capture some (or even one) of these content streams at each grade level, making all that content - all that knowledge and teaching - available to the world on the web. There are millions of children around the globe who do not have access to schooling or are unable to attend school due to work. This project would help enable those with the desire (and with internet access) to continue their education at their own pace.

In practical terms, this is a departure from traditional text-based wiki projects. Video does not lend itself to incremental editing. However, some wiki sites already use static media (such as course curricula in Wikiversity) as the primary knowledge transfer device. The more important aspects of wikis - the collaborative contribution of users providing the video - and the over-riding goal of WikiMedia to bring knowledge to the masses are both deeply satisfied by this project.

There are several ways this project could be implemented. School districts/teachers/parents could volunteer their schools/classrooms to be recorded and the raw video posted, chronologically. Under this implementation, the best teachers/classes would bubble to the top of a user rating system, filtering the content somewhat.

Another, more manageable and efficient but also more costly solution would be to videotape a teacher who was not in front of a class - i.e., dedicated to the project - and capture one subject at a time. For example, an initial subproject could be to video instruction in mathematics, beginning with the names and shapes of the numbers, progressing through basic mathematic operations, geometry, algebra, and calculus. A dedicated instructor would also allow a much more condensed version of the schoolday - a good portion of any school day, especially in the early years, is not educational content. Dedicated instruction would also be easier to break up into small (e.g., half hour) modules or lesson blocks.

There are certainly drawbacks to the idea - lack of interaction with the teacher, language differences, ecc. - so this will by no means replace traditional schooling. WikiSchool would be a great resource where that schooling is unavailable or unobtainable. With more than 70 million children out of school at the primary school level alone, WikiSchools could have long-lasting benefits to humanity, and help Wikimedia achieve its goal of making all knowledge accessible to everyone. It is the enormous scope of this benefit that should be weighed against the costs of variation from the traditional wiki structure.

Alternative names

WikiSchools WorldSchool FreeSchool

Related projects/proposals

• Wikijunior - Subproject of Wikibooks, aimed at providing free books for children.
• Wikikids - (proposal) An editable encyclopedia for children.
• Wikiversity - An online, editable collection of educational courses.
• Simple English Wikipedia - Wikipedia project written in simple English grammar and words.

Domain names

Maybe its worth acquiring the wikischool.org name. That could give a boost to this project and provide it with a good name.

People interested

1. Sansmap