“Coming together is the beginning;
keeping together is progress;
working together is success.”
WHO WE ARE
Wikituition Online Academy (WOA), is a platform for providing free education to all. The project started in 2009 as Tutionpedia and registered a domain name in the same name on 11 December 2009. The idea came to my mind when I contacted some professors and scientists to clear my doubts at the time of developing some innovative materials for my Ph.D. program. I noticed that a lot of people are generous to share their knowledge, but they don’t have a platform to share their valuable knowledge. I also noticed that those people who are highly knowledgable in their field are very reluctant to share their knowledge as it is a time consuming one. I decided to build a platform to share knowledge.
At that time while visiting a lab, I noticed that in that lab there is one equipment that I am searching for a long time. I stood outside the lab to see the in-charge of the lab. On the door of the lab, I noticed a quote, and it really inspired me. After some time the Professor arrived, during the discussion, he told me that he is very helpful to all and very generous. At the end of the conversation, I requested his permission for using the machine for my research project. He simply smiled at me and said, “This machine is not free, if you need you to have to pay for it, if you are ready to pay another problem I won’t accept any payments from students, if your university is ready to pay, I am ready to allow the machine to you, unfortunately ( I believe), your University won’t offer you the money to pay for such a machine. So what can I do….!” I decided to go as he is not intended to share the machine with anyone. I told him, this quote is really inspiring but that is not in the right place. I took that quote by Henry Ford.
Wikituition Courses offers free online courses. This is an amazingly simple online learning platform that offers free online courses for anyone, that will definitely advance your career and life.
“Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man To Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime.”
WHAT WE DO
Wikituition started in 2009, codenamed as ‘Tutionpedia’, later on, 12 February 2011 it is changed to ‘Wikituition’. Initially, a few tutorials are available on this site due to the lack of time. In 2011, I rebranded this site as Wikituition and registered the domain as wikituition.com on 12 February 2011 and started adding free tutorials to the site when I get free time. In 2012, I prepared a proposal “Wikituition and the scope of online education” and submitted it to a startup accelerator’s incubation program for getting some startup support. They asked me to submit a detailed business plan showing financial projections for the next 5 years. As I intended to provide free education for all those needed on this planet, I don’t have any solid business plan to raise money. At that time internet connection speed and availability is not adequate to deliver video contents to all locations. So the startup accelerators are cautious about the success rate of such a project at that time. They shared their anxiety about delivering content online rather than offline. Moreover, I need to register a company to step into an incubation center. I lost hope in the project as I intended to provide free education to the masses.
At that time, I had another website Nanoguru (to offer free tutorials and contents related to nanoscience), with hundreds of free tutorials on nanoscience. In 2015, to focus more on this site, I abandoned the Nanoguru project and took only the best tutorials to merge in this site. At around 2016 there are a number of major players evolved in the online education segment offering a wide variety of online content. I kept the project aside as there are a number of similar paid services operated online. In 2016, the domain was dropped due to my lack of interest in this project, but I regained the domain quickly. I noticed that still there are no free online course providers to provide free education to masses. I decided to continue with the project.
The idea of Wikituition is very simple, it is better to teach people how to do something themselves than to just do it for them. Through these free online courses, people will learn how to help themselves.