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
Wikipedia is one of the most important resources for public education in the world. It’s free, openly licensed, and available to anyone who has internet access worldwide. No ads, no collecting or selling of personal data, and no fake news. So for Open Education Week, we’re highlighting how higher education instructors and their students use … Continued
The current cultural buzz around oat milk weaves together conversations around food sustainability, plant science, health, pop culture, and new industry growth. But before December 10, 2018, you couldn’t find anything about oat milk on Wikipedia. Now, thanks to a student in Yin-long Qiu’s Plants and Human Health course at the University of Michigan, the … Continued
Dr. Rebecca Dew is an independent researcher and current Wikipedia Fellow, where she has leveraged her academic expertise to improve the Wikipedia articles about activism and authority. Here, she reflects on the value of making knowledge available to all. An opportunity to inform public knowledge on this scale comes, for many, only once in a lifetime. Actually, for me, … Continued
This term, Dr. David Webster is trying something new. “This year’s textbook [is] written by previous years’ students,” he announced over Twitter, much to the excitement of his followers. Dr. Webster has taught his students at Bishop University how to contribute to Wikipedia as a classroom assignment for a few terms now. In his Spring 2016 course, Memory, truth … Continued
Highlights We hit a major milestone this month in our Classroom Program. Students have officially contributed more words to Wikipedia since our program’s inception in 2010 than were published in the last print edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Executive Director Frank Schulenburg wrote a piece about the significance of this milestone, which can be read … Continued
Dr. Niki Kalaf-Hughes is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bowling Green University. She recently participated in our Wikipedia Fellows pilot cohort as a member of the Midwest Political Science Association. Here, she reflects on the experience. During one of my first experiences as a teaching assistant in graduate school, I was … Continued
The more relevant coursework is to a student’s life or career, the more they will agree that their education has been worth the cost. Strada and Gallup released a study last month, From College to Life: Relevance and the Value of Higher Education, which seeks to understand students’ perspectives on the value of their higher education. … Continued
Gary Greenbaum, also known as User:Wehwalt on Wikipedia, is a Visiting Scholar at George Mason University. Through the Visiting Scholars program, Gary gets access to George Mason University’s academic sources and databases, expanding the reach of those collections and improving his own abilities to create and maintain Wikipedia articles. Here, Gary shares an example of how … Continued
