Any radical, international, distributed/federated free online universities exist?
If not, why not?
@neil I’m also interested in this question. It’s the great failure of MOOCs.
@neil Not sure what that would look like, but if they're not out there, I guess it has to do with supply and demand.
@neil isnt that called...
the internet? 😂
(Actually possibly somewhat seriously - I never really did academia, instead the internet is, in a somewhat haphazard fashion where i've done most of my studying & teaching)
@dazinism Ha, good shout! You know what, maybe it is. It could perhaps do with a more curated syllabus and a better system of mentoring. But then, maybe it works well enough as it is.
@neil @dazinism Or is it maybe the wiki federation?
Check out the 'site network diagram' and
'federation search' at the bottom on http://federated.wiki/federated-wiki-introduction.html
@neil You'd have to stretch the meaning of "university" pretty far to give it those adjectives. A university can't be distributed because, apparently, all of the knowledge is concentrated in professors. That's why "learning environments" exist.
A distributed university would not have dedicated environments, and thus not have knowledge "concentrated" in a small number of people. Is this the idea?
The internet is a contender, but lacks a pervasive norm of inquiry.
@kdsch "university" as in coherent facilitator of higher education.
I was thinking distributed more as in geographically, not necessarily in knowledge of a subject. Also more from a technical infrastructure perspective - i.e. instances communicating with each other, not a centralised platform such as the existing MOOCs.
I am completely OK with subject-matter experts, mentoring others in a particular domain. Though with fluidity in that a professor in one area would be a student in another.
@neil stuff like Khan Academy, Udemy, etc.?
@neil
I do believe a "full" educational experience you could give a child that is completely lefty is one of the things the lacking that prevents more adoption of "free" society principles.
@neil @Gin @mayel IIRC, many exiled Turkish academics have been doing these-or-similar, I think?
I'm pretty sure https://off-university.com is one of those (although it might be a different-but-related part of that broader movement)?
challenge #1 is making a distributed wiki software. challenge #2 is getting people to use the multiwiki. once you can share and organize information, you have *most* of what you need to run a class. of course, then you have *also* accreditation and other higher education bureaucracy to deal with if you want to hand out Walkaway U diplomas that mean anything outside of federation space.
Hey, looks like @Gin and @mayel are on the case with https://haha.academy!