Introduction to the Free University Project

Overview

The Free University Project is an all-volunteer non-profit effort to build an accredited online university through community-driven collaboration across the internet. This motivation for this project draws upon many concepts advanced by the Free Software movement, chief among them our social contract which guarantees, among other rights, an open admissions policy and no tuition ever.

Contributing

This Project is now in its very infancy. We need your assistance to deliver on our goals. Contributions of time and energy to this project would be appreciated in whatever capacity and field of interest you may provide:

Developing, composing, writing, or editing course materials (including mini-books, lecture notes, etc.).
Teaching a course with material developed within or outside the project.
Serving as a recitation advisor / lecturer to provide support to a course taught by others.
Participating as one of the early students to both learn and help provide feedback for further refinement of the courses.
General advocacy of the project.

Courses

We've set up a full course catalog which represents our wish-list of all future courses that we would like to offer one day. Though almost all courses listed within it are in the earliest stages of development, they are all listed for two important reasons:

The courses serve as a roadmap to current and potential students outlining the directions we want to take and curriculum we want to develop.
Maybe more importantly, the course listings expose our rough-hewn development and hopefully make it easier for potential contributors (faculty, staff, etc.) to find an area or course of interest and lend some time and energy.

For the more pragmatic, we also make available a more realistic overview of current and near-term course offerings, along with the ability to suggest courses of interest. Additionally, the individual schools of science, engineering, and humanities, as well as specific departments, should also provide more focused curricula.

Obstacles to Success

Transparency is a key component of a community-driven project such as this one. Obviously, our public mailing lists are one of the primary tools to allow this type of transparency. However, it would probably also be constructive to outline some of the difficulties in development of this form of project that may already be foreseen:

Development and faculty/staff contributions can not be primarily motivated by developers' "desire to scratch a big itch." This phrase, coined by Eric Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar signifies the incremental additive contributions, motivated by short-term desire for a given feature, that propel most community-driven Free Software projects. Since the Free University Project does not provide a concrete deliverable product analogous to a piece of working code, there is less short-term productive rewards for contributors.
The benefits (real and/or perceived) of a large-scale project such as this are not necessarily incremental and may be harder to immediately codify.

However, on the other hand, we have a much wider base of potential contributors than most software projects (as relatively technical programming knowledge is not at all necessary). Regardless, though, in some ways this may also be viewed as one experimental foray of the community-driven Free Software development model into other fields. However, the Project is not an experiment: it's an earnest attempt to create exactly the type of Free University described above, one based upon a social contract with a prime directive of serving the needs of our students and benefitting the wider academic community.