Federating Wikipedia as Open Educational Resource

From Devwiki

This presentation will cover the requirements (along with a case study) for "federating" Wikipedia contents (or MediaWiki family repositories) as the seed material for developing Open Educational Resources. We will be discussing the specific details of Technical - protocols & integration, Policy - licensing & sharing, and Content - life cycle stages & curriculum alignment, characteristics with associated caveats of such a system. We will also demonstrate the CK-12 Flexbooks platform system that leverages Wikipedia, and Wikiversity family of Wiki repositories for developing K-12 Textbook materials.

CK-12, a non-profit organization launched in 2006, aims to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide. Using an open-source, collaborative, and web-based compilation model that can be manifested as an adaptive textbook - termed the "FlexBook", CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational web texts. The content generated by CK-12 will serve as both source material for a student's learning and also, provide an adaptive environment that scaffolds the learner's journey as he or she masters a standards-based body of knowledge.

CK-12 leverages Wikipedia, Wikiversity, and Wikibooks as federated repositories for producing K-12 textbook contents aligned with curriculum guidelines. The technology infrastructure is based on the principles of Content Federation complying to Technology and Legal compatibility.