Wikipedia Education Program

Group:	Features
Start:	2011-11-01
End:	2015-09
Team members:	Andrew Russell Green, Sage Ross, Jeroen De Dauw (original author)
Management:	Terry Chay

The Education Program extension was used on a number of Wikipedias, with experimental use on other projects (Wikiversity, Wikinews) as well. Andrew Russell Green and Sage Ross worked on improving the user experience and squashing the extension's bugs. Bugs and feature requests were managed on Phabricator at the MediaWiki-extensions-EducationProgram Workboard.

Current status updates
Past technical updates

Do you use the current course page software? Let us know what changes you would most like to see.

Current plans

Although it is functional and meets some of the needs that aren't met by using conventional wiki pages to organize educational assignments, the current user experience for the course pages and other elements of the Education Program extension need to be overhauled. We anticipate that Andrew will continue developing it gradually, while the WMF may or may not develop a more general system for supporting in-person outreach efforts later on. So we plan to redesign the current system piece by piece, making the new elements as modular as possible. See also the Education-Program-Dashboard Workboard on Phabricator.

Current goals

More Notifications (FBOA students Jeff and JJ are working on these)
- Notify students of talk page posts on their articles
- Notify users when they are added by others to a course role (student, instructor, volunteer)

Begin creating general editor campaign tools, which will eventually replace the EducationProgram extension
- Early work will focus on defining groups through signup campaigns

Medium term goals

Create a way to extract lists of student usernames for one or many courses at once (either by having the EP extension talk to the Editor Campaigns system, or just a standalone EP special page that outputs CSV files)

Nice to have

Improve design and editing UX for course pages.
Add a step in the enrollment process to (by default, with opt-out) enable email for all notifications, and get emails from users who have not set one.

Fix students table bugs (these represent legacy code issues, but are probably easy enough to be worth patching)
- Make non-existent articles in students table behave better (redlinks, letting user add more than one, don't break when the article gets created then re-added) (bug 57608)
- Convert article urls ( a common mistake among students) into titles (bug 44397)

Provide a way for students to request help, wherever they are on Wikipedia.
Make iterative improvements to the course activity feeds.
- Inline diffs like WritKeeper's script
- Basic stats on recent and total activity for a given course

Long term goals

Turn main course page into something awesome (with modular parts that may appear or not based on use case and which user is using it)
Integrate trainings into course pages
Integrate a course creation wizard into course pages

Design ideas and mockups

Diagram of some of the main workflows associated with course pages: setting up a course page before an assignment begins (pink), updating a course page while an assignment is going on (blue), and participating in an assignment from beginning to end as a student editor (green).

Course page redesign mockup by Sage Ross, from May 2013.

History

After initial development by Jeroen De Dauw (see initial Software design document), the EducationProgram extension was deployed on English Wikipedia in late 2012, and has been used actively since the beginning of 2013, with maintenance by Jeroen until July 2013. In October 2013, Andrew Russell Green began working as the primary developer of the extension. It was archived in 2018.

Wikipedia Education Program

Contents