I checked out Wikibooks as our science department is in the middle of planning to create some open source information to provide to our online science students. We are in the research and discussion stage though I really think that a creating our own wiki resource is a great option.


So this week was very relevant to one of our science department goals is for this year. We have a goal to explore creating some open source materials for our online course. We have some classes that use text books and others that use the online information provided by our partner. The main issue with the information provided is that it is not as comprehensive as we would like and is currently supplied in a very rigid structure. Assignments and activities are inbeded into the online source. Which makes it very difficult to adjust or modify the curriculum as we would wish.

It looks to me like we can start to collaborate on producing such an online source by using a wiki. I checked out the online text book project at Wikibooks which is a web wide effort to do the same. I specifically looked at the biology section and found that it was started but just barely. There are other such movements that we are looking into as well as just creating our own information as well.

As a department we have all agreed philosophically that the information should be open source and available to all. This does bring up the interesting fact that with the open enrollment system we could very well be contributing to the success of other online schools in the near future, who under the current system are in direct competition for our potential students. With the current capped enrollment system in place this could be potentially fatal to our endeavor.