Education/Newsletter/June 2017/Education at Iberoconf 2017
Education at Iberoconf 2017[edit]
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Summary: IberoCONF, held in Buenos Aires on June 10-12, was the meeting for the Affialiates of IBEROCOOP to meet and discuss the movement's activities in their regions. Among the topics, a full morning was dedicated to discussing education programs: actual and future projects at local and regional level.
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Vahid Masrour, from the Wikipedia Education Team at the Wikimedia Foundation engaged the education focused conversation with a presentation, which opened discussions regarding different aspects that impact directly on Education Programs. Among the points that generated significant discussion were:
- The possibility to create shared standards of quality for Education Programs
- The value of conducting research on the impact of education programs on participants, in order to gather more evidence to share with educators
- The possibility of turning Wikipedia into an Open Education Resource (OER), through adding exercises and quizzes to articles. While the concept is being discussed, there's no doubt this would go a long way in positioning the Wikipedia in the education field.
Luisina Ferrante, Education Officer at WMAR, then led a session where México, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, Spain, Uruguay, Chile, Brasil, Wikimujeres, Basque User Group and Argentina participated by sharing their current activities in education: in particular their work with universities, highschools, research institutions as well as Wikimedia contests directed at the educational field.
One of the outcomes of the education sessions was the discussion of using the Argentinian's Chapter MOOC (Wikipuentes) to implement it at a regional scale. Chile, México, Italia and Venezuela have shown interest in implementing the Wikipuentes MOOC (which is focused on educators) in their countries, as a first step in developing virtual courses in their contexts, with the objective of thinking a future regional Wikipuentes.