WikiEdu Dashboard version 1.0 is live!

Today, Wiki Education Foundation is officially releasing version 1.0 of the WikiEdu Dashboard: http://dashboard.wikiedu.org. The Dashboard is a new system for keeping track of the courses participating in our programs.

This tool, built in collaboration with our digital creative partner WINTR, gives us a clearer window into the progress of student editors. The Dashboard presents data for every person enrolled in a Wiki Ed-supported course. It shows their most recent contributions, how much content they’ve added to articles and sandboxes, and how many page views for the articles they’ve edited. We are working on adding features in the coming months as well.

One of the goals for the Dashboard is to raise the number of student editors who complete the online training. The Dashboard highlights users who haven’t gone through the training, and how many students have finished it for the course. We released a beta version of the Dashboard in January, and we’re already seeing a major impact. Nearly 50% of enrolled student editors have completed the training so far this term; last term, fewer than 20% did so.

As the spring 2015 cohort of classes moves from training and learning about Wikipedia into choosing topics and drafting articles, we’re looking forward to even more positive impact from the Dashboard. With version 1.0, we can see which student editors don’t yet have assigned articles to work on, and we can spot cases where an editor starts building up too large a draft without working on a live article. We expect the Dashboard to prevent some common problems and keep classes on track to make major improvements to Wikipedia articles.

The version 1.0 Dashboard is just the starting point. There’s a lot more we want to do to with the Dashboard by fall 2015 and beyond. We intend to use this Dashboard as the foundation for a new and improved Wikipedia course page system. And of course, it’s all free software on Github (available under the MIT License). Check it out!