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What If We Ran Universities Like Wikipedia?
Pickens writes "Do university bureaucracies still make sense in the era of networks? At the recent Educause conference, David J. Staley laid out the findings of a focus group he conducted asking educators what a college would look like if it operated like Wikipedia. The 'Wiki-ized University' wouldn't have formal admissions, says Staley; people could enter and exit as they wished and the university would consist of voluntary and self-organizing associations of teachers and students 'not unlike the original idea for the university, in the Middle Ages.' In addition, the curriculum of the 'Wiki-ized University' would be intellectually fluid, and instead of tenure, professors' longevity 'would be determined by the community.' Staley predicts that a new form of academic organization is emerging that will be driven by volunteerism. 'We do see some idea today of how "volunteer teaching" might look: think of the faculty at a place like the University of Phoenix. Most teaching faculty have day jobs — and in fact are hired because they have day jobs — and teach at the university for a nominal stipend,' writes Staley. 'If something like the Phoenix model is what develops in a wiki-ized university setting, this would suggest that a new type of "professorate" will emerge, consisting of those who teach or publish or conduct research for their own personal or professional satisfaction or for some other nonmonetized benefit.'"
Not sure if people have the total concept of what a university looked like in the middle ages (despite looking it up on the wikipedia). Basically people who joined universities were mostly either clergy, civil servants, or what we would call today "professional" students.
Back in those days, other than the church, there were generally no need for preparatory degrees. Most good jobs that regular folks could aspire to didn't require degrees, they required lengthy apprenticeship which one could tackle by working for essentially peanuts for awhile or actually paying money to join various guilds.
However, if one had a patron (or a rich family) or if you wanted to dedicate your life to the institution (often associated with the church, but there were some secular institutions), you could instead attend a university and study law, medicine (usually reserved for rich folks), or theology. In the modern era, who would be paying for all this stuff over the 20 or so years that a typical university course of study would entail is quite an interesting problem.
Of course for those that have the attraction of becoming a professional student, maybe running a wiki-university like the middle ages is interesting, but I don't think it's what many folks had in mind.
I get the feeling that most folks are thinking about a "free" prep-education for business or engineering or some other trade. That's not really like a university from the middle ages, that is like a much more modern re-invention of the university into a trade-guild. Now, instead of joining the guild, you pay your tuition to a "university" and learn a trade or skill from someone there and get your guild-card/degree to hang out your shingle or to join a co-op/company.
I think that the folks interested in the "free" prep-education should instead just be questioning the whole concept of a guild that a university education has become and if a wiki-guild is actually more what some folks had in mind...