Education Program Pre-Conference/Notes

(added link to pad to http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_Program_Pre-Conference)

Attendees

• Rod Dunican, Wikimedia Foundation
• Sophie Osterberg, Wikimedia Foundation
• Tighe Flanagan, Wikimedia Foundation
• LiAnna Davis, Wikimedia Foundation
• Muriel Staub, Wikimedia Switzerland
• Charles Andres, Wikimedia Switzerland
• Martin Poulter, Wikimedia UK
• Ad Huikeshoven, Wikimedia Nederland
• Cornelia Trefflich, Wikimedia Deutschland
• Monica Mora, Panama
• Kiril, Macedonia
• Ivo Kruusamägi, Estonia
• Tim Moritz Hector, Wikimedia Deutschland
• Samuel, Venezuela
• Rodrigo, Uruguay
• Nasim, Bangladesh
• Esteban, Argentina
• Thomas Planinger, Wikimedia Austria
• Lane Rasberry, USA
• Dennis Chen, Taipei Taiwan
• xx, India
• Emily Temple-Wood, Chicago USA
• Liang, TaipeI Taiwan
• Peter Gallert, Namibia
• Oren Bochman, Israel
• Nasir khan, Wikimedia Bangladesh
• Andriy Makukha, Wikimedia Ukraine
• Sarah Stierch, USA (and WMF) (User:SarahStierch)
• Ganesh Paudel, Nepal- Participated in the second half.

Fears (led by Peter)

• Make sure you're not just creating institutional knowledge in your mind -- programs need to have multiple people who know what's happening. How do you replace yourself?
• How do you handle the waves of complaints that are coming? Don't ask for exceptions for your students.
• If students have challenges technically, keep them in sandboxes.
• Many students don't even know what an encyclopedia is.
• Overcoming the knowledge barrier about the projects. Do students know you *can* or *should* edit?
• Scalability is a challenge.
• Difficult to get respect from professors/teachers due to age, seniority, rank in organisation
• Difficult to get people to do something for free
• Fears/Challenges:
  • Retention
  • Training
  • Recruiting Ambassadors
  • Copyvios/plagiarism
  • Dealing with the community
  • Communication
  • Roles
  • Sustainability
  • Collaboration/Peer review
  • Technological Challanges (Moodle Education, Programm Extension, User Metrics)

==Creating a university program/Best practices (led by LiAnna) (Addressing challenges from previous session) Discussing blog (Vojtech Dostal)

• target group
• Learn how to say "No" / Be modest in the beginning; there are a number of different directions you can take your education program -- define what you want to get out of your program so you don't lose focus on goal
  • US example, start small with narrow scope, then expand
  • Start small and figure out what works -- definte your goal early
• Learn how to be a teacher of Wikipedia -- Communication
  • Tailor messages to audience (Professors, Wikipedia community)
  • We need to answer one question for each audience: "Why is this important to me?"
  • Facilitate and Liaise between groups / messages / focus
• Work with your community
  • Each Wikipedia has different dynamics
  • Tell the community about the program and what will be happening (e.g. we will have a lot of students creating accounts)
  • You will have classes and educators that will be working on Wikipedia, but is not part of your program
  • Facilitate communication with Educators and community off-wiki as necessary, provide resources
  • Ed Program is not an arbitrtor of what classes do, can only guide in right direction
    • This sho
  • Education team can help advocate with the community on the benefits of learning and teaching
• Remember that your people are volunteers
  • Ambassador = volunteer role; people have different motivations, from quality control to formatting
  • Pairing people with complimentary sets of skills
  • Grouped approach "pods"
• Central organizing place on-wiki
  • List classes, resources
  • list on language wikipeida, not just on chapter wiki for example (in the Wikipedia namespace)
• Advertise results / Have fun with it!
  • Celebrate successes, publicize

Challenges:

• Retention. We do not care about retention. We care about adding quality content to Wikipedia
  • Focus retention on instructors; new editors each term (related to sustainability issue)
  • Tragedy of the commons ... consuming lots of limited resources. Only one paper on "wikipedians are born and not made" this is not a convicing argument.
  • Address recruitment/retention with other programs and initiatives
  • Bursty action created by the education programs is no different from regular newbies coming at random?
• Sustainability
  • Institutionalization; making the Wikipedia assignment centered around a university
  • Initial cost, effort upfront, then step out and support as needed
  • Finding champions
• Copyvios
  • Translation assignments for foreign language classes of good and featured articles into local languages

==Wikipedia in UK Insutions (Martin) Working from the top down

• Funders
• University leaders
• Education support
• Education quality
• Education researchers
• University librarians
• Policy makers
• Communities
• Advsiory services
• Staff training
• Journalists
• Research enterprise

These people can make things easier for classroom innovation, but they can also make it difficult. Effect long-term cultural change to make this happen.

JISC:

• Taxpayer money go to universities
• Main advice on educational practices in universities and colleges
• Work on quality
• Publish research
• Trying to change advice to have it include Wikipedia in education.

Find who you want to talk to. Treat them as VIPs, regardless of whether they're fans of Wikipedia already.

Five levels of enthusiasm: 1. Hostile, hate Wikipedia. Thank for their time, move on. 2. Misconceptions. Debunk them. 3. Indifferent. Just doing their job, don't see how Wikipedia's related. Enthuse. 4. Keen but not sure what to do. Give them case studies, examples. 5. Eager. Give them something specific to do.

Ideal pitch: 1. Who are you going to talk to? 2. What do they want? 3. What can you do for them? 4. What do you want? 5. What might be barriers?

Recruiting ambassadors

Campus ambassador: Help in the classroom, no need to be Wikipedians. Online Ambassador: Help online, is a Wikipedian.

OAs:

• Recruited from WikipedIa User pool.

e.g. Emily's case, 2 terms ago. Recruited by another online ambassador.

CAs:

• Recruited from professor's TA pool
• Recruited from previous students
• Recruited from teaching and learning centers, librarians
• Watchlist notices

Come from the community

Materials & training

• Most of them are on Outreach Wiki
  • http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_Portal/Projects_and_Programs
  • Encourage people who are doing education project add detail on it.
• Printing materials
  • http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_Portal/Tips_and_Resources
  • Feel free to ask the orginal english file, and translate / localize the file.
    • Brochures
      • Case study
      • Instructor basics
      • The syllAbus.
      • Illustrating Wikipedia, image issue
      • stickers!!
      • Cairo Pilot program plan

• traning
  • start small training workshop and modify little by little (Past)
  • scale up through online materials (Now)
• topic: how do you teach with Wikipedia?
  • ambasador / professor / student edition on English WikipedIa page
• Currently on Wikipedia, possibility is to use Moodle in the future

Sage Ross's slide

• online traning can be an assignment for students.
• students need to leave feedback. "Certification and Feedback"
  • very useful feedback to re-edit the traIning page
• how to get the training up on my wiki?
  • 2 components: template framework & training contenT
  • Import from Meta, and localize it.

Q&As,

• translation?
  • swedish, portuguese, czech
• maintainece frequecy
  • bug fix instantly
  • revisIon, revent from feedback in the end of semesters

We want Sage Ross!! :)

Extension: Education Program

• as different target group
  • for professors:
    • struction
    • monitoring studenTs
  • for students
  • for community
  • for program leaders
• History
  • this january
• how does it work
  • slide demo
  • New User Interface design is coming
    • course page wizard
    • environment token: invitation mechanism for students to cherIsh the course.
    • "my course's feed": awesome SOCIAL MEDIA tool!!

Pros

• easy to get started
• monitor activity (my course's feed)
• student editors leave traces
• open to any class

Cons

• need more features for analytics, easIer collaboratiOn, and notiFicationS
• design
• need developer volunteers

How to get it on your wiki?

• translate IT
• have consensus with local communities

Reaching out to different target groups

• Silverknowledge project. For generation 50+. EU funded project
• Partering with organisations in the area of senior education
• Useful to have more courses than three as well as communication on the wiki
• Personal contact is very important for this senior group rather than using online communication
• Senior universities were good partners
• Improving post-training support, such as tea-house

• Outreach to women in current educational efforts
• Seem to prefer a more 'social' setting than a workshop in a computer room.
• One-to-one contact seem to increase the confidence and enable women to keep on contributing

• Important to find target groups who have time, motivation & interests

• Using other projects as focus for an Education Program

Program evaluation (led by Frank)

Why? 4 reasons:

1. Did your program work or not? Was volunteer time useful?
2. Did you pick the right program for your chapter's goals?
3. Has your program improved over time?
4. FDC wants to know what to fund.

The approach: Enable people to do evaluation themselves. Bring people together to talk about program evaluation, use shared language, shared understanding.

Take-aways

• It's not about editor retention, it's about quality content.
• Philosophy to engage and empower students.
• Start Ambassador program.
• Start 50+ program.
• Start small and have a pilot, grow slowly. Test! Learn! Change!
• Better undersatnding of MediaWiki extension.
• How to make a pitch to someone who's not on board with the idea.
• Tools that already exist for students and professors.
• Try a project on Commons.

Still needed:

• Central place to exchange information among programs.

Technological Issues

Plagerism detection support via corenbot contacts: User:Coren (implimentor) & User:Madman (current operator) ask i18n team to assist languages suppor interaction & incentive design for education: (however this should be approved by community as an optimisation of CPVIO mecanism)

The bot should 

notify: student campus ambassodors teacher an email to the dean ethics comittie of the institute .... on repeted offenced resulting in a ban of the user. flag it with a "plagarism" tag rather than a CPVIO tag so RCP will expect a differnt flow Customise CPVIO templates with plagarism languages - with a planned remedy being correction (sythesis+citation) rather than blocking. Communication with community members in NPP RCP etc... Autamated Metrics assignment assesment. retention & sustainability (user metrics) - different catagories have different weight. editors ... ambassadors - idealy come out of the instituion, particularly if this is handled beyond a course level. teacher - act as multipliers and advocates Peer review plagarism as a concern in peer review during formative education tasks will generate awarness of the issue. Inline Comments. Gamification in education !? Mediawiki Limits (acount creation from an IP is limited) LMS (Moodle), Education program extension, User metrics. Snuggle tool usage to monitor new editor activities (User:EpochFail)