Education/Archive/Assignment Design

The Wikimedia Foundation has created a series of helpful brochures and an online orientation for instructors, all of which cover important facets of assignment design based on the experiences of hundreds of educators worldwide. These aids along with the simple exercises below will help you develop your own curriculum.

Instructor Basics: How to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool

This brochure covers key Wikipedia policies and structures you'll need to understand, best practices on article selection and working with the community, and sample grading rubrics.

Case Studies: How professors are teaching with Wikipedia

Fifteen professors from six countries are featured in this brochure, as each explains how he or she used Wikipedia in the classroom or how he or she graded the assignment. The web version of the brochure includes links to syllabi and assignment handouts.

The Syllabus: A 12-week assignment to write a Wikipedia article

This document provides a week-by-week breakdown of how you can incorporate a "write a Wikipedia article" assignment into your classes. It includes some key milestones that have proven effective at ensuring that students derive the greatest educational benefits from editing Wikipedia.

Online orientation for instructors

All instructors are highly encouraged to complete the online orientation for educators before planning a syllabus and assignment. It will introduce you to the culture and rules of Wikipedia, demonstrate the basics of editing, and walk you through a typical Wikipedia assignment.

Education program toolkit

The Education Program Toolkit contains the shared knowledge and the collected resources and strategies that Wikimedians and educators have tested and refined throughout the past decade.

Simple exercises

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These simple exercises are intended to familiarize students with the basics of Wikipedia before they begin a major Wikipedia writing assignment.

  • Basic editing tasks – students create userpages, improve the clarity of a sentence in an article, upload an image, add a reference to an article, and select a mentor.
  • Sourcing assessment – students assess the sources in a new Wikipedia article. It can be adapted to require participation on the talk page of the article.
  • Encyclopedia comparison – students compare and contrast a Wikipedia article on an author with another encyclopedia's entry about the same author. It can easily be adapted for any discipline with relevant tertiary sources. It requires no knowledge of wikicode.