Most students know about Wikipedia, and many of them probably use the site as a resource for coursework. But some might not know about the plethora of offshoots that Wikipedia has. All of them are experimental sources of free education, and they are helping to fuel the debate of the value of a free education as opposed to one that you have to pay (a lot of) money for.

One of Wikipedia’s side projects is called Wikiversity. According to the site, its goal is “…the creation and use of free learning materials and activities.” Wikiversity is part of the ever growing free culture movement, a movement which strives to allow people to educate themselves for free using creative works on the Internet and through other sources. It’s a social movement, and it’s one that generally supports much more relaxed copyright laws, or no copyright laws at all. So far, Wikiversity has hundreds of courses in six different departments including Physical Sciences, Humanities and Interdisciplinary Studies.

So far, the project has been a success, and it has recently changed to a different site, wikiversity.org.Learning projects are available for every type of student, from pre-school to post-doctorate. The idea is that the learning process should be collaborative, and the site highly encourages people to contribute to the knowledge presented on the site, not simply use the knowledge.

Sites like Wikiversity are posing some interesting questions about education, the answers to which will define how education of students takes place over the next decades. At the moment, ideas about the free culture movement and open source technology are still in their infancy. How will we define the value of an education in fifty years if students no longer have to pay for what they learn? Should learning be free and open to everyone? Is education a privilege or a right? If a student educates himself on open source sites, and manages to possess more knowledge than a student who attends Harvard University, can that student compete for the same types of jobs as the Harvard student? Why shouldn’t they be able to?

The Internet has opened up an entire new world of learning and education – but how this new world will take its final form remains to be seen.

Tags: Online Education