Running a Wikipedia assignment for the first time can be exciting, but it can also be a bit overwhelming. To help ease some of those first-time jitters, here are some tips directly from veteran instructors. Be flexible As one instructor put it, “It will be chaotic, there will be confusion. Embrace that and let the … Continued
Wiki Education launched the Dashboard in 2015 and it has truly been a game changer for instructors and students running Wikipedia assignments. Since that time, we’ve been steadily improving the Dashboard so that instructors can more easily facilitate their Wikipedia assignments; students can make meaningful and lasting contributions to Wikipedia; and so we here at … Continued
Almost a decade into the Wikipedia Student Program, it can be easy to take the immense impact of the Wikipedia assignment for granted. Millions of words added by close to ten thousand students term after term has become the norm, and Spring 2019 was no exception. Almost 8,500 students from 400 courses across the U.S. and Canada contributed … Continued
Now that Wiki Education is regularly supporting around 400 Wikipedia assignments each term, it would be easy for us to simply leave well enough alone. Term after term, the vast majority of instructors (over 90%) indicate that they will run another Wikipedia assignment with many of those making it a mainstay of their pedagogical repertoire. … Continued
Our Classroom Program — where higher education instructors use our support and help resources to teach their students to add course content to relevant Wikipedia articles — has thrived and grown over the past eight years. During that time, we’ve listened to and learned from our participants, adapting our support and tools to better fit their needs. … Continued
Wiki Education’s technology team is consistently updating the Dashboard to run more smoothly and to better suit the needs of the thousands of people who utilize it. As part of our mission to improve its open source code in a sustainable way, we engage young developers in contributing their own improvements to the Dashboard. If … Continued
Term after term, virtually all of the instructors who participate in our Classroom Program (between 97 and 99%) indicate that they will run another Wikipedia assignment in the near future. While we’re happy to report this success year after year, a far more interesting story is why so many instructors adopt the Wikipedia assignment as a main-stay … Continued
In our continual efforts to improve our core resources, we’ve incorporated feedback from program participants to make the Timeline feature of our Dashboard tool more effective. The Dashboard is used by all instructors and students in our Classroom Program. And since 2010, that has been more than 1,000 instructors and 43,000 students. That’s a lot of people … Continued
The Spring 2018 term was significant as much for what happened as for what didn’t happen. What happened During the Spring 2018 term we supported 400 courses! This was our largest number of courses to date, and more than we anticipated. More importantly, over half of those courses were taught by returning instructors (220 to be … Continued
