Outreach Wiki

Wikipedia Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting/April 2012

< Wikipedia Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting

Agenda

edit
  • Date and time: Monday, April 23, 20:00 UTC
  • Led by: Pine
  • Agenda:
    • Welcome (Pine)
    • Country updates: U.S. (Jami), Canada (Jonathan), Egypt (Annie/Faris/Essam), Brazil (Tom, Juliana), The Netherlands (Ziko or Siebrand), others?
    • U.S./Canada student survey results from fall 2011 (Ayush)
    • Working Group information (Jami/Frank)
    • Q&A (Pine)

US

edit
  • Starting to work on how to institutionalize at universities
    • Successful so far at Louisiana State, and determining how we can replicate the success there elsewhere
    • Ambassadors joining institutionalization
  • Looking into what classes are doing so far
  • A few minor issues with student contributions
  • Goals for fall
    • 90 classes for fall; more for spring
    • focus recruitment on disciplines in social sciences
  • US Leaderboard: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program/Fall_2011/Editor_Statistics_US

Canada

edit
  • Things are going well
  • Most classes are finished
  • Students enjoyed the experience
  • Leaderboard shows students from wide range of disciplines added content to mainspace
  • One class had several Did You Knows, and two articles reached Good Article status
  • Learned from mistakes of last semester; professors working with Ambassadors better to ensure students are making constructive contributions to Wikipedia
  • Outreach event at University of Western Ontario and Quebec coming up soon

Egypt

edit
  • Cairo pilot going really well
  • Students will be editing in late April, early May
  • Good edits coming already out of French and Spanish translations class
  • Amazing examples of student work coming out of Cairo pilot, including one where a class improved an article 10x
  • Expect more contributions soon

Brazil

edit
  • Juliana: working on a number of courses with students, including a voluntary course where students do their own research on a subject area and a distance learning program
  • Student programs are good source to recruit Ambassadors for the next term throughout Brazil

Netherlands

edit

We've made first contact with Hogeschool Utrecht (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HU_University_of_Applied_Sciences_Utrecht) in December 2011. End of February 2012 we had a follow-up conversation. Initally we were to have a pilot with about 15 students at an English language programme. By the second meeting, this was changed to about 12 students at a Dutch language program.

Involved are Siebrand Mazeland and Ziko van Dijk. Ziko is also involved in the German program. He's done a day of professor training in editing Wikipedia (nl.wp), and about two hours of working together with professor and students on selecting an article to work on.

The program has started 2 or 3 weeks ago, and will continue for another 6 weeks or so. The professor expects that each student will contribute about 1500 words.

Students will work on a new or existing article in their user namespace. That is what they will be graded on by their professor. Together with the existing community, there will be an effort to move the created content to the main namespace later. It is unclear yet how that will be organised.

Student survey results from U.S./Canada (Fall 2011)

edit
  • Demographics
    • About 10% of students who edited WP as part of the program took the survey
    • 61% undergrad, 39% graduate; 3/4 from US
  • Important motivators
    • Grade
    • Interest in their Wikipedia article
    • Usefulness of work (not a throwaway assignment)
    • Graduate students reported a broader range of motivations, including rating that their work contributes to freely accessible learning base
  • Learning outcomes
    • 2/3 thought it was a beneficial experience, 20% strongly agreed
    • identify poor quality articles
    • identify bias in articles
    • write in a neutral POV
  • Support resources
    • Online text & printed materials most used resources
    • 93% of students who used CAs found them very helpful
    • 74% of students who used OAs found them very helpful
    • Opinions of the community. Survey participants were asked to choose two adjectives from a list. Most common choices:
      • Helpful (72%)
      • Collaborative (39%)
      • Intelligent (27%)
  • Looking ahead
    • 46% expressed interest in editing WP in the future
    • Hardest thing about the experience?
      • Wiki syntax
      • Challenges of learning how Wikipedia works
      • Editing was more work than they expected
    • We acknowledge it's limited due to difficulties getting students to fill it out; we're hopeful we will have more students participating in the future

Working Group

edit
  • Turning over running of US and Canada Education Program to a new organization. The Education Working Group will create the new structure
  • Submit proposals on wiki
  • Concerns about hand-off.
    • Ensuring continuity is really important. How can we make sure what we've learned gets transferred into the new structure -- perhaps some of the WMF staff helps new organization through some type of advisory board structure
    • Working on documenting learning points
  • Working Group will take on questions of funding, relations with groups including WMF
    • Relations with WMF? See FAQ question about thematic organizations
  • Working Group are not the only ones working on the program; they are expected to gather input from Wikimedia and academic communities
Retrieved from "https://outreach.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_Education_Program_Metrics_and_Activities_Meeting/April_2012&oldid=33531"