A reliable future for Programs & Events Dashboard
Over the last few months, I’ve been working on some major changes to how the Dashboard, Wiki Education’s wiki program management and tracking software, works. Keeping up with the ever-increasing usage of Programs & Events Dashboard — it’s been used by more than 3,800 program leaders to track nearly 9,000 events and more than 120,000 … Continued
Bringing the Instructor and Student views of the Dashboard closer together
For a long time now, our instructors have asked if they could see the same features of the Course Dashboard that their students see. We’re very excited to announce a change that brings the instructor and student views much closer together: both instructors and students now have the My Articles and Upcoming Exercises sections on … Continued
Authorship Highlighting improvements
We recently launched an awesome new feature to the Dashboard’s Authorship Highlighting, thanks to volunteer open source developer Bailey McKelway. Bailey is a full-stack developer who recently graduated from Fullstack Academy in New York City, and judging by the sophisticated work he’s done on the Dashboard, he’s got a strong software development career ahead of … Continued
10 years in education program technology
This fall, we’re celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Wikipedia Student Program with a series of blog posts telling the story of the program in the United States and Canada. Ten years ago when I joined the team that started what became the Wikipedia Student Program, we didn’t have any specialized software to organize classroom … Continued
Finding your students’ work
Having trouble finding the work your students did on Wikipedia? We’ve been working on making the Dashboard a better tool for evaluating student work, but we know we know there’s still more work to be done. The Wiki Education technology team — myself and Wes Reid — have been meeting with many instructors over the … Continued
New Dashboard feature helps with grading your Wikipedia assignment
If you visit the Students tab of your course page, you may notice that it looks a bit different. As the first phase of our Spring 2020 push to improve the instructor user experience, we’ve rolled out a new version of the Students list that lets you view details about the Article Assignments for any … Continued
Dashboard interns Khyati and Amit join Wikipedians in the SWASTHA initiative
Khyati Soneji has been improving the Wiki Education Dashboard for nearly a year now. She joined our open tech project as an Outreachy Intern in 2019 and is now mentoring another intern for a new project. Recently she attended the SWASTHA meetup in Mumbai along with our 2019 Google Summer of Code intern Amit Joki, … Continued
Updating the student user experience for Spring 2020
For the Spring 2020 term we’ve added a major set of features to the “My Articles” section of students’ course pages. The centerpiece of this update is the Progress Tracker which students can use at each stage of the Wikipedia article-writing process. The Progress Tracker will allow students to see what they should be doing, … Continued
Privacy policy updated
We’ve just updated the Wiki Education Privacy Policy. Like the last version, this one is adapted from the freely-licensed policy of Automattic, the company that makes the open source blogging software WordPress. We’ve based it on Automattic’s policy because they have a well-earned reputation for protecting users’ rights, along with the resources to cover their … Continued
Dashboard wins Coolest Tool Award
“Tools” — the various pieces of technology that work with Wikipedia but aren’t part of the core wiki software, most of them created and maintained by volunteers — are a huge part of the technology story for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. This year’s Wikimania conference included the first ever “Coolest Tool Award” ceremony to … Continued