Education/Countries/Thailand/Pilot program at MUIC
Pilot program at Mahidol University International College[edit]
We wish to introduce senior undergraduate students to Wikipedia editing. The pilot group is environmental chemisty class made up of eight students (sex: 5 males and 3 females, nationality: 5 native and 3 foreign, major: 7 chemistry and 1 environmental science). Students will pick their topics on the 6th week and give a presentation on the 12th week. The topic must be approved by the instructor and should be under one of the following areas:
- life-cycle assessment (LCA)
- environmental impact assessment (EIA)
- roles of environmental protection agencies (EPAs)/Non-governmental organisations (NGOs)
- renewable/clean/sustainable energy
- environmental diseases/occupational safety and health (OSH)
- global climate change
- bioremediation/environmental toxicology of selected pollutants
The assigment weights 40% of the final grade (30% for writing Wikipedia and 10% for presentation).
We expect students to improve an existing article or write a new one. The quantitative aim is ten sentences per students and at least one reference per sentence. They may contribute more but we will only count edits that stay on Wikipedia. We anticipate that student contribution would be mostly technical and should fill in knowledge gap by adding a new content to a existing short article or writting a new article on a specific technical term.
We hope to learn a lot from this small initiative and wish that it can be expanded later in the future. The small class size and close supervision from experianced instructor should maximize the chance of success of this pilot program. We also anticipate other potential benefits: some students may become campus embassadors or take Wikipedia activities to their student clubs e.g. volunteer club, science club.