The Dashboard is Wiki Education’s platform for organizing and tracking Wikipedia classroom assignments and other learning and editing activities. Part assignment design tool, part learning management system, part metrics tracker, part training framework, and part alert system, the Dashboard was built from the ground up to support our Wikipedia Student Program — and has been extended to support a diverse array of other programs as well, such as the Wiki Scholars & Wiki Scientists courses we offer.
dashboard.wikiedu.org
The Dashboard software powers our programs at dashboard.wikiedu.org. From self-paced instructor orientation modules, to the Assignment Design Wizard for building a Wikipedia writing assignment, to student training modules, to assignment tracking, to an FAQ and help request system, to monitors for plagiarism and student work that is in danger of deletion, to post-course surveys, to highlighting the cumulative impact our instructors and students have on Wikipedia, the Dashboard underpins most of our work. It’s allowed us to scale the impact of our programs while maintaining a small staff and budget.
P&E Dashboard
In addition to dashboard.wikiedu.org, we also maintain an open version of the Dashboard system for use by the global Wikimedia community: Programs & Events Dashboard, a.k.a. P&E Dashboard (or Peony Dashboard). P&E Dashboard is used by thousands of program organizers around the world, supporting more than ten thousand events across about 300 different wikis. It features internationalization — with translations of the interface provided by volunteers at translatewiki.net — and is the most widely used tool for organizing edit-a-thons, Wikipedia classroom projects, other newcomer-focused wiki programs.
The Dashboard codebase
We’ve been developing the Dashboard since 2014. It consists of a Ruby on Rails application server, with a user interface built mainly with the JavaScript framework React.
Wiki Education’s Chief Technology Officer Sage Ross is the primary developer and maintainer of the Dashboard, but it’s been worked on by more than 150 contributors over the years, including contract developers and designers, Wikimedia Foundation engineers, Google Summer of Code and Outreachy interns, and open source volunteers.
