Education/Countries/India/Christ University/CUWEP2017

Metrics

General program information

• Event start date- June 2017
• Event end date-March 2018

Education metrics

• Number of instructors :1
• Number of instructor editors:1
• Number of students:475(Kannada)+498(Hindi)+223(Sanskrit)
• Number of volunteers:2
• Number of admins/sysops:3
• Number of classes:30
• Number of faculties:6

Global metrics

• Number of active editors involved : 24
• Number of newly registered users :266(Kannada)+ 280(Hindi)+ 112(Sanskrit)
• Number of individuals involved  : 475(Kannada)+498(Hindi)+223(Sanskrit)
• Number of media files uploaded  : 0
• Number of articles created or improved: 230 in Kannada+ 90(Hindi)+7(Sanskrit)
• Number of bytes added/deleted :

Diversity metrics

• Number of female instructors :
• Number of female students :
• Number of female program volunteers :
• Number of female program leaders :

Activites

Social media campaign

In order to encourage students and highlight the articles created or edited by the students, an initiative has been taken to share articles on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

This initiative has been a great influence in promoting the work done by students to the communities also it helps the communities to understand the work done by the students as a part of the Education Programs activities. While the students have often failed to understand the importance of WEP editing as a contribution towards Open knowledge creation, amalgamating their efforts with Google doodle, tweets and Facebook posts regarding the importance of their articles has helped them to identify the potential and impact of their work.

On 25 June 2017 one of the student created an article on Max Born as a part of their internal assignment but on the 12-11-2017 it was selected as a Google Doodle

Time line

We follow the below timeline at Christ University to make our work easier and it will be helpful for us to increase the participation of the community members to take part in the WEP activities.

Odd Semester

Month	1st Semester	3rd Semester
June	Orientation on Wikidata, allotment of the Q numbers and students doing the activity	Orientation and Writing the text about women achievers in 20 lines ( work done in Sandbox)
July	Language correction and grading from the faculty	Language correction and grading from the faculty
August	-	-
September	Proofreading of text on Wikisource	Wikification of the article written earlier and adding image
October	Language correction and grading from the faculty	Language correction, Wikification, and grading from the faculty
November	Verification of the work done by the students from community members or CIS-A2K	Verification of the work done by the students from community members or CIS-A2K
December	Moving qualitative articles to the main namespace and updating it to community members	Moving qualitative articles to the main namespace and updating it to community members

Even Semester

Month	2nd Semester	4th Semester
November	Orientation and Writing the text on their user page	Orientation and Writing the text about their core subjects in 20 lines ( work done in Sandbox)
December	Language correction and grading from the faculty	Language correction and grading from the faculty
January	Internship activity for the students	Internship activity for the students
February	Wikification of their user page and adding an Image	Wikification of the article written earlier and adding image
March	Language correction, Wikification, and grading from the faculty	Language correction, Wikification, and grading from the faculty
April and May	Internship activity for the students	Internship activity for the students
June	Analysis of the work done by the students in this year and reporting to community members	Analysis of the work done by the students in this year and reporting to community members

Certificate course

A group of 37 students from Christ University have enrolled themselves for a Wikipedia certificate course for the academic year of 2018-19. As an active step towards enabling the awareness on content editing and contributing skills on Wikipedia in vernacular languages, Christ University, in collaboration with the CIS-A2K started the certificate this course for students in 2016. The Wikipedia certificate course is conducted after normal working hours for a total of 45 hours and carries 2 credits for the academic records of the University.

The objective of this certificate course is to enable students to acquire skills working along with Wikimedia projects which involve both technically equipping and holistic through its instruction. The course consists of three major components, the first step is an introduction to the concept of Wikipedia, which incorporates the history of online encyclopedias and the evolution of Wikipedia as one of the largest online encyclopedias available on the Internet. It also involves looking for resources for drafting articles on User sandbox and moving articles to the main space. The second step teaches students on how to edit and publish articles on Wikimedia projects, also adding tables and references, and also includes introduction to common templates, wikification of articles, legal aspects, policies, and guidelines, and how to identify vandalism and tackle it. The third step discusses Wikipedia’s notability and social significance, which lets the students understand Wikipedia in a critical and evaluative manner, where topics such as its ethics, existence as a social community, existence as a democratic project, How Wikipedia is used by students, teachers librarians and journalists.

Learning outcomes of the course

• Create and edit wiki articles of good quality, with references, illustrations and templates etc,
• Capacity to teach Wikipedia with peer groups, without any fear.
• Discuss what is a reasonable source critical approach for using Wikipedia as a reference.
• Outline the common criticism of Wikipedia's reliability and discuss how the reliability problems can be tackled.

The Wikipedia Certificate Course syllabus can be accessed here.

Christ University Education Program review

“	It is our job to move into digital pedagogies and Wikipedia is the best tool for that. --By Rathi M T, Educator at Christ University, Bangalore, India	”

As rightly said, this investment is seen with the collaboration of Christ (Deemed to be University) and The Centre for Internet Society (CIS), Bengaluru. Ms. Nichole Saad, Program Manager, WEP, Asia Region visited the institution and interacted with faculty and students. Her visit provided us a platform to share our learnings, experiences, and views on WEP initiative. Her meeting with the students was interactive on both the days and the discussion was fruitful. The session began with an introductory presentation wherein the achievements of the Wikipedia in the academic curriculum was mentioned. To keep the sessions active, activities were conducted for students on both the days. We shared our views on issues like acceptance of Wikipedia as a trusted Knowledge source was discussed widely. You can find the detailed report here.

• 
  Nichole with Christ university Faculty members and students took part in Certificate Course
• 
  Educators at Christ University discussing the benefits and challenges of using Wikimedia projects in the classroom

Internships

In order to improve the quality of existing content on Kannada Wikipedia, CIS-A2K mentored 17 interns from Christ University, based on suggestions from the community. The students were asked to improve stub articles on Kannada Wikipedia. The students, while interning at CIS-A2K, edited and improved upon 2500 stub articles. Additionally, a list was made of articles that existed without images and references which were then improved by adding corresponding images and references. Around 300 articles were improved by the Christ University interns. This was widely appreciated by the community members.

Learnings

Wikidata Based Education program

In 2017, We started Wiktidata based education program for the undergraduate students, which is one of the major learnings.

As the wish to edit Wikipedia and its sister projects among undergraduate students were enormous, we decided to involve these students in editing Wikidata. Editing Wikidata doesn’t have the same requirements as writing an encyclopedic article; the editors just fill the necessary fields. Students were editing on main namespace some fo the dits made by them were wrong so ti was difficult to track the mistakes/errors done by them for this we were criticised from the community and later with lots of difficulties we corrected those.

Out of wiki events increase to contribution

Editing all day can be boring for students. That's why we try to organize/engage in diverse activities which are not directly connected to editing but supports education and personal development. These activities include photography, visits to different cultural and scientific institutions etc. Out of wiki activities encourage students to increase the contribution.

Quality

The emphasis on quality improvement (though difficult to implement) has motivated students to carefully compile references and enabled the faculty in taking the complete responsibility in the evaluative process.

Involvemnt of community memebrs

To Involve the community members in the better fashion to give more value to work.

Evaluation Process

Till 2017 CIS-A2K was involved in the Evaluation process of the work done by the students. Even after many trials, we were not able to hand it over this process to faculty, but in the year of 2017, we were able to motivate the faculty with the help of community members to do the complete evaluation of the work done by the students and also one of the faculty members is motivated so much and she became an active Wikipedian.

Reaching out to community members through Newsletters

Newsletters are an extremely valuable marketing tool used by all the institution to spread the awareness of the activity done or lead by them. It helps to maintain contact with community members and also it attracts new participants and retaining existing participants. After knowing all of these we started to send the updates of the work done related to Wikipedia Education to a Newsletter to which is maintained by Education team at WMF.