Edit:
I called an editathon to try out the proposal outlined below. You are invited to join.
How to support authors’ donations to Wiki? Donate to them elsewhere.
I have been long thinking and looking into research on how education can be sustainable, safe, quality, accessible, and scaleable. I see three issues with sustainability that influence the other features: The under-representation of lower-resourced communities that have a higher threshold to development of and access to the content relevant to them; the shift toward a lack of open licensing to gain finances for high-quality content; and the financing models that compromise the safety/privacy/comfort (ads) or divert the focus from the crucial work (grants, crowdfunding).
A solution could be to create a pay-what-you-want remixable space where people could search, donate to, and interact with openly licensed resources and each other via collaborative editing and discussions. The closest I found are Amazon Ignite, Gumroad, TeacherPayTeachers, MOOCs, Scratch, OER Commons, GitHub, Itch, Roam, Learning Webs in Deschooling Society, Schoolhouse.world, Patreon, Anagora, and Wiki. Out of these, Wiki is the most malleable and possesses enough momentum to serve as a crossroads to other sites such as those mentioned.
Authors can link to their donatable openly-licensed content on the talk page of a Wiki article. I also put an offer on the Reward board in line with Safe Harbor paid-article policies. The upcoming grants of the 2030 Movement Strategy go in the direction of sustainability, accessibility, and bridging content gaps as well. There are risks in introducing monetization. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to experiment with it as there might be extensive potential benefits.
How to augment Wiki for collaborative learning? Add searchable conversations.
Wikipedia is a go-to place for the first contact with a topic. It is accessible, addresses multiple views with accounting for the bias, and has quality and breadth. Directly linked ways to connect to discuss the material would help. The readers can come from diverse backgrounds and points of view, which is ideal for enrichment.
The editors could add the conversation hubs on other sites such as meetups, VoiceThread, Scratch, free4talk, Schoolhouse.world, discord, Jitsi, Eventbrite, or Reddit on the site annotation via Hypothesis. A date can be set there for the synchronous events. Linking to the existing meeting sites with a facilitator present and safety measures would lower the common risks. The relevant resources could also be listed. Hypothesis is searchable, too - see here.
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