Education/News/December 2017/Greek User Group organises Wikipedia e-School for Educators
WM User Group Greece organises Wikipedia e-School for Educators
editAuthors: Marios Magioladitis, Konstantinos Stampoulis, Fotis Tsalampounis
Summary: WM User Group Greece organises Wikipedia e-School for Educators for second time this January.
Wikimedia Community User Group Greece has been organizing Wikipedia in Education projects since 2010. In 2017, we decided to provide online tutorials for educators in order to magnify the impact of this work. The e-school consisted of 8 cycles, each of them lasting a little over a week, and a 3-week period after that for the project completion. The e-School was mainly educational but some of the sessions focused on hands-on training. It aimed at educators at all levels (primary, secondary and higher education) with the main objective of familiarizing them with the Wikipedia Educational Program, Wikipedia and its sister projects with the final goal of inspiring and suggesting new ideas for school projects that involve Wikipedia.
More than 150 educators enrolled to the courses (56,3% of the participants were women; 81,7% were educators in Public schools).
The general feedback was positive. Comments from the educators that participated include: "Interesting experience, mainly due to the many scientific fields that can be involved, but also the plethora of ways it provides for its integration into the educational process." "It helps you to learn actively rather than passively. This is the most important element. " "I learned a lot of things [...] to apply with my students the practices I learned."
Easy-to-use software, Wordpress and the Learnpress plugin, was chosen for the lessons. The lessons consisted of links to Wikipedia help and policy, videos that were created for this program in particular with technical information about Wikipedia, videos from the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia in Education series with Greek subtitles that we translated, and live online distant-learning lessons that aimed at consolidating and enhancing knowledge, which were recorded and remained available online.
54,4% of the participants were very satisfied from this platform and only 12,3% were somewhat satisfied.
The results in detail of the forst attempt were presented in Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017 in Poland and in WikiFemHack in Greece. The program will resume in January in a mixed form of both e-tutorials and in-person meetings for educators on the island of Corfu.
More information can be obtained in this presentation.
Tags: E-learning