MediaWiki

Wikipedia Education Program/Dashboard

< Wikipedia Education Program

Background

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Existing Solution: Education Extension

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The Education Program Extension facilitates educational programs by adding features for teachers and students that are improving Wikimedia projects as part of the Wikipedia Education Program. Features include various interfaces to manage courses, institutions, students, mentors, etc., as well as improving workflow for everyone involved with supporting the work of students on the Wikimedia projects through: managing enrollment, aggregating changes made by students, associating article contributors and reviewers, and providing several analysis/statistics interfaces. The Education Program Extension has had a demonstrable and measurable impact[1] on the Wikimedia projects and the free knowledge movement. This page documents those impacts.

Proposed Solution: Dashboard

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The Program and Events Dashboard will be an internationalized version of the Wiki Education Foundation's Dashboard, broadened to be used for editathons, workshops, education programs, and writing contests. You can test an alpha version at https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org.

Time savings

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The ultimate aim of this tool is to make the most of volunteer or staff time, which is one of our most precious resources. Here are rough time estimates of manual time spent on tasks, and how this tool may reduce them.

Project set up

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Setting up a course/workshop/editathon takes X hours (rough estimate)?

Project monitoring

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Monitoring participant contributions takes X hours (per week, per session, per participant; rough estimate)?

Project reporting

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Reporting on cohort's impact takes X hours (rough estimate)?

Use cases and user stories

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The Program and Events Dashboard will be developed with specific use cases in mind. These specific use cases likely have overlap in their specific user stories, and these will help us plan accordingly. Some user stories may already be "complete," but perhaps not in an internationalized version. Please feel free to edit and add to the lists as you see fit!

The general guiding principle is to have a tool available for all languages and on any project/wiki (and multi-project, as described a bit below), and to design for a broader use case than just education courses.

Editing workshop

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An experienced Wikipedian and a librarian at the Gotham Library join forces to host a workshop to introduce new editors to Wikipedia, teach them how to edit, and improve coverage on the history of the city of Gotham. They promote it both on-wiki, to get experienced editors to help teach newbies, and on non-wiki sites. They want new users to be able to land on the Dashboard site and sign up for a wiki account. Before the workshop, they need to set up a Dashboard event (called a "course" in the current Dashboard architecture), and an on-wiki event page, which includes: IRL event info (date, location, transportation, what to bring, etc), training materials, and a link to register for the event on the Dashboard. They also need to be able to send invites to people to register on the Dashboard and review materials. After the event, they need to be able to see the Global Metrics for the workshop.

  • a more complex but fairly common case would be a mutlilocation/multidate workshop series.

Multilanguage writing contest

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The Wiki Loves Women writing contest was hosted by two experienced Wikipedians. They wanted to encourage other experienced Wikipedians to create at least one article on a notable African woman in either English or French. The participants joined teams, of at least 1 person, and collaborated on an article. Articles were claimed by each team and some articles were translations of the matching articles from the other language. The contest jury judged articles on the quality of the contribution.

  • a more complex case would be the real life details of this story: a team of Armenian Wikipedians joined unexpectedly and created 41 articles in Armenian. These should also be captured in the results of the program.

Wiktionary summer camp

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An experienced, respected Wikimedian ties wiki editing to social events during a two week long summer camp. 8-17 years old kids work in teams to edit Armenian Wiktionary and proofread Armenian Wikipedia and Wikisource. They also upload audio files of word pronunciations to Commons and include them in Wiktionary articles. There are three workshops per day, totaling four hours. At the end of each day, they assign points for contributions and choose the best team and best editor.

User requirements

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Education activities

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People participating in and supporting Wikipedia assignments are able to organize their courses, monitor contributions, and report their achievements.

User stories

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Teachers can create course pages with minimum required elements (start and end dates, country, institution) and add optional details (course guidelines, evaluation rubrics, training modules).

Course pages create on-wiki versions in a specified namespace/location on a specified wiki through OAuth.

Students can register for specific courses.

Students' contributions on any Wikimedia project are captured by their course page.

Course pages cohorts can edit in multiple languages or on multiple projects (eg. student contributions can be on multiple wikis and consolidated in a single course page).

Media files and uploads are included in contribution data (Commons or local wikis).

A user opens up the dashboard and finds relevant courses (by language, country, affiliation?). Instances of the dashboard and localization of the interface?

Students can redlink articles they intend to work on if they do not exist yet, and redlinks will be resolved when those articles are created.

Editathons

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A leader should be able to:

Create the program, including a description, start date, end date, or other applicable logistics

Invite organizers

Add or remove organizers

View the group's activity and track progress toward program goals

Talk to the people who have joined a campaign

End the program, so no one else can join and any additional activity by participants is not counted as part of the program activities.

A leader may also like to...

Create a report/archive page that gives a brief overview of the program once it's over.

An organizer should be able to:

Create one or multiple event page(s) on wiki, possibly in multiple languages, with a location, start/end date, or other applicable logistics

Create a description/introduction for each event page

Share training materials / videos with participants

Providing a suggested list of things to do

Invite participants

Invite other organizers

View the group's activity and track progress toward program goals

Add or remove participants

Specify categories to automatically add to articles created

An organizer may also like to...

View individuals' contributions and thank them for it.

Talk to the people who have joined a campaign

A participant should be able to:

Be invited to the program

Join the program they're interested in

Not take the training if they don't want to

Find a list of things to do

Get an introduction to Wikipedia basics (if they're new)

Automatically add categories to articles created

Participants may also like to...

Be guided through setting up a Wikimedia user account

Talk to other people in the campaign

Introduce themselves to the group

Claim an article or set of articles, so others can help them or pick something else to do

View the group's activity and track progress toward goals

Leave the program

Writing contests

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A leader should be able to:

Create the program, including a description, start date, end date, or other applicable logistics

Invite organizers

Add or remove organizers

View the group's activity and track progress toward program goals

Talk to the people who have joined a campaign

End the program, so no one else can join and any additional activity by participants is not counted as part of the program activities.

A leader may also like to...

Create a report/archive page that gives a brief overview of the program and the winners once it's over.

An organizer should be able to:

Create one or multiple event page(s) on wiki, possibly in multiple languages, with a location, start/end date, or other applicable logistics

Create a description/introduction for each event page

Share training materials / videos with participants

Providing a suggested list of things to do

Invite participants

Invite other organizers

View the group's activity and track progress toward program goals

Add or remove participants

Specify categories to automatically add to articles created

An organizer may also like to...

View individuals' contributions and thank them for it.

Talk to the people who have joined a campaign

A participant should be able to:

Be invited to the program

Join the program they're interested in

Find a list of things to do

Get an introduction to Wikipedia basics (if they're new)

Automatically add categories to articles created

Participants may also like to...

Be guided through setting up a Wikimedia user account

Talk to other people in the campaign

Introduce themselves to the group

Claim an article or set of articles, so others can help them or pick something else to do

View the group's activity and track progress toward goals

Leave the program

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Feedback on proposal from potential users

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"Personally, I very much like the idea of having an education extension incorporated onwiki, accessible as a namespace. In fact, I was perfectly happy with the extension as it was besides a few bugs (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T59608). It is very probable that - even if the dashboard was adapted - Czech education program would keep on using the extension." Vojtech.dostal on https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T91676

"The biggest drawback with the tool as it exists is its features. If it were deconstructed to be

  1. an "enroll" button and list of enrolled users
  2. the metrics providing service that it is
  3. and a blank text box where people can write anything

then I can think of no other single intervention so poised to transform so much about Wikimedia community organization. The same problem existed with the Education Extension - it presumed a lot of user desire for features which actually created problems, when blank space and no buttons would have brought better outcomes.

I have used both the education extension and the dashboard a lot. I like the education extension's enroll button and the way it allows for freely posting content. The dashboard makes these things harder but the metrics service it provides is awesome. In the case of both products, a major drawback is the education branding. While both are useful for class outreach, the labeling of "class" "instructor" "education" makes it awkward to use the tools for student clubs, library meetups, and especially, cohorts which are similar to classes but completely outside a university context. Even in classes sometimes the education labeling does not apply, or it seems a bit forced.

I would love to see the dashboard stripped of its education labels and made available for English Wikipedia and beyond. Until and unless the dashboard / education extension is well-designed and has community support in one language I would pause to push it out to all projects." Bluerasberry on https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T91676

"I agree with Bluerasberry. Except instead of taking out the features make them easy to rename for use in formal and informal training groups. And add features that would work for WiR following training groups or any group of people interacting on Wikipedia from an organization." FloNight on https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T91676

"Privacy standards will need to be in compliance with WMF policies and local laws. WMF is unlikely to have sufficient legal knowledge of jurisdictions around the world to customize these tools appropriately for so many localities, so leadership from affiliates, volunteers, and GLAMs will be necessary.

A common complaint that I hear is the amount of time that volunteers and affiliates are expected spend documenting their activities for WMF. This dashboard may be helpful if it moves a significant percentage of the administrative overhead burden from affiliates and volunteers to WMF staff and tools." Pine on Program_Capacity_and_Learning#Tool:_Program_and_Events_Dashboard

Feedback from Bluerasberry

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I have used the old Wikipedia Education Extension, Wiki Ed's dashboards, and other event management schemes for years over 200+ events. I am available for a chat and can make referrals to other Wikipedians if anyone needs user feedback to guide development. Here are some thoughts -

  • "Teachers can create course pages with minimum required elements (start and end dates, country, institution) and add optional details (course guidelines, evaluation rubrics, training modules)." - These elements are not the minimum requirements. Feel free to cut all of these things out. These were offered in both the education extension and the dashboard and more often than not all of these things are better not used at all. These are burdensome to the teachers and the Wikipedians.
Before adding perks please make sure that a minimal event page can be created. The minimum requirement is a blank text space for the instructor/manager to write something, an easy student/participant signup process, and automatic outcome reports. Please note that all of these other things - "start and end dates, country, institution, course guidelines, evaluation rubrics, training modules" are broken in the old systems and unless someone invests time in clever changes the same old problems may resurface. Please research each of these items to see how they failed in previous iterations before re-instituting them. If possible, skip them or make it possible to turn them all off.
  • "A leader should be able to: Invite organizers"
Please mind - I think it would be better to only have two ranks - manager and participant. If there are more ranks than that then please do documentation first then software development second. Previous iterations had no documentation created for the ranks and the ranks were never understood.
  • "The Program and Events Dashboard will be an internationalized version of the Wiki Education Foundation's Dashboard, broadened to be used for editathons, workshops, education programs, and writing contests" I have another feature request. Both the education extension and the Wiki Ed Dashboard present a listing of a set of Wikipedia articles. In both cases, that listing is generated in connection with a participant list. The dashboard especially generates easy metrics from that article list, including the most important statistic, article counts over time. Could someone make a version of the Wiki Ed Dashboard that omits student / event participant lists? I want exactly the same thing as dashboard, except a view that disallows any humans to join the project. For many organizations, the emphasis is on the Wikipedia articles and not the participants. They care about knowledge and readership. It is a WMF peculiarity that says, for example, more people editing more times is "better" or more important than other kinds of engagement. It would be extremely useful to be able to make lists of ~20 Wikipedia articles, get article traffic from each, and get a running total of how many pageviews they have gotten from a point in time and perpetually. The Wiki Ed dashboard can already do this, but to make this happen, one "student" would have to enroll then list all the articles as their project. I would like to manually add articles to a dashboard that has 0 students, instead of using a workaround to get metrics associated with one dummy student. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:48, 16 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Meeting notes

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See also

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References

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  1. ↑ https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Extension/Impact
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