At the recent Wikimania conference, coordinators of Wikiversity, the Wikimedia Foundation’s wiki-based education project, said that they believed the project would really get off the ground in the next two to three years. Wikiversity is a community where free educational content can be created and hosted: this content includes multimedia learning materials, resources and curricula for all age groups in all languages.

A major part of Wikiversity learning is being organized around Learning Projects and Learning Groups. Wikiversity explains that it has adopted a “learn by doing” model for education. Editors are encouraged to provide learning activities for Wikiversity “students” (participants). Wiki technology promotes collaborative webpage editing, so Wikiversity collaborative wiki editing projects can be thought of as “learning projects” — participants learn while they edit wiki pages and explore topics of interest.

Wikiversity is not going to become an officially sanctioned service recommended by schools or universities, because no-one has control over the content. But college students in the United States and elsewhere are already keen users of online educational resources (see this survey, for example), so there are certainly opportunities for educational publishers and Wikipedia to create links between online learning resources and textbooks, and for educators to consider these collaborations in choosing which learning sources to recommend.