Wikipedia Education Program

Wikimedia Foundation projects Wikipedia Education Program A MediaWiki extension to support the Wikipedia Education Program Group: Features Start: 2011-11-?? Team members: Andrew Russell Green, Sage Ross, Jeroen De Dauw (original author) Management: Terry Chay

• The Education Program extension is currently in active use on a number of Wikipedias, with experimental use on other projects (Wikiversity, Wikinews) as well. Andrew Russell Green and Sage Ross are currently working on improving the user experience and squashing the extension's bugs.
  • Bugs and feature requests managed on bugzilla
• Status updates

Current plans

Although it is functional and meets some of the needs that aren't met by using conventional wiki pages to organize educational assignments, the current user experience for the course pages and other elements of the Education Program extension need to be overhauled. We anticipate that Andrew will continue developing it gradually, while the Growth team may or may not develop a more general system for supporting in-person outreach efforts later on. So we plan to redesign the current system piece by piece, making the new elements as modular as possible.

Near term goals

• Allow course leaders to assign articles to students (patch)
• Allow course leaders to add students to courses (patch)
  • Provide a better way of checking whether a user is part of a course, by including course information at Special:Contributions (mockup)
  • TODO later: Make instructions for adding students more simple and compact.
• Implement Notifications for course events
  • Notify all participants of new posts to course talk page
  • Notify students of talk page posts on their articles
• Fix the most significant bugs that won't involve rewriting the core course page code
  • Students table bugs
    • Make non-existent articles in students table behave better (redlinks, letting user add more than one) (bug 57608)
    • Convert article urls ( a common mistake among students) into titles (bug 44397)

Medium term goals

• Create a way to extract lists of student usernames for one or many courses at once
• Use a conventional wiki page for main page text of course pages.
• Provide a way for students to request help, wherever they are on Wikipedia.
• Make iterative improvements to the course activity feeds.
  • Inline diffs like WritKeeper's script
  • Basic stats on recent and total activity for a given course

Long term goals

• Turn main course page into something awesome (with modular parts that may appear or not based on use case and which user is using it)
• Integrate trainings into course pages
• Integrate a course creation wizard into course pages

Design ideas and mockups

Diagram of some of the main workflows associated with course pages: setting up a course page before an assignment begins (pink), updating a course page while an assignment is going on (blue), and participating in an assignment from beginning to end as a student editor (green).

Course page redesign mockup by Sage Ross, from May 2013.

User testing

As we get closer to a redesign of the main course page UI/UX, Sage will do lightweight user testing. Let him know if you want to participate.

History

The Education Program extension is currently in use on English Wikipedia and a number of other Wikimedia wikis. After initial development by Jeroen De Dauw (see initial Software design document), it was deployed on English Wikipedia in late 2012, and has been used actively since the beginning of 2013, with maintenance by Jeroen until July 2013. In October 2013, Andrew Russell Green began working as the primary developer of the extension.

earlier tools and related documents

• Document outlining the state of things before the current extension
  • http://toolserver.org/~fschulenburg/student-o-meter.php
  • http://toolserver.org/~fschulenburg/courseinfo.php?courseid=7