Education/News/February 2018/More than 30 new courses launched in the University of the Basque Country
More than 30 new courses launched in the University of the Basque Country
editAuthor: Galder Gonzalez
Summary: This year we have kick-started our Education Program, and we have met more than 120 university professors and lecturers in the University of the Basque Country in order to open new courses to teach Wikipedia and create high-quality articles for 12-16 year schoolchildren. Now, we are having our first results, and more than 30 new courses have been launched in this term.
When we started our Education Program we had a goal in mind, namely creating quality articles on basic topics for schoolchildren. Our method would be a well-established one, having University students write their assignments down using Wikipedia. So we had to make strong liaisons with professors and lecturers in order to reach those students and have their work graded. We taken a top-to-bottom approach: we started off in the University direction, then we made a meeting in each faculty in the University of the Basque Country. In these meetings we met nearly 100 lecturers, and some of them are now with us.
Simultaneously we tried a bottom-up approach, reaching lecturers we knew could help, and talking to them about other colleagues that could be interested. The numbers are also good here, with a higher rate... but it's also more time consuming.
Now, the term has started and we have students from sciences, humanities, arts or engineering working with us, so we can cover a high part of our program. We have students writing about physics, architecture, languages, sports, or history. A group is creating articles on science history and we have art students that will try to produce artworks to illustrate articles.
We hope to have more than 500 students in this first effort, and if everything goes as expected, it will give us a good input on the validity of our program.
One way to show how the activities are progressing is this screenshot of our "campaign" which includes all the different classroom programs:
Tags: Basque Education Program