What did we learn from Wikibridges MOOC?

Author: Luisina Ferrante (WMAR), Florencia Guastavino (WMAR)

Summary: How did we developed a virtual course for highschool and university teachers. How we organized and what we learned from the 6 editions we did since 2014. We want to share tips with others education programs to develop a MOOC where teachers can learn how to edit in Wikipedia.

The education program of Wikimedia Argentina has been carrying out during four years a virtual proposal known as Wikipuentes "Bridges between school, digital and free culture". We organized virtual courses for teachers of high schools and universities with the objective of learning how to edit in Wikipedia and encouraged them to generate educational proposals using the free encyclopedia in their classrooms. We created a virtual campus specially designed to develop MOOCs for teachers, and we carried out 6 Wikipuentes, in which more than 500 teachers attended and more than 1000 articles were improved.

Why do teachers want to learn how to use Wikipedia? How can we help them through the Education Program?

Some learnings from our experience:

The course must have an educational proposal, teachers need to know from the beginning that they can use Wikipedia in their subjects.
Teachers want to learn how Wikipedia is organized. Who edits in Wikipedia, how they can do it and which are the importance of the sources? We suggest to design a specific session to clarify some crucial details about Wikipedia, for example: Wikipedia is not a primary or secondary source, it's a place where you can start asking questions and find some answers, also you can improve information and discuss with other editors meanings and specific information about a specific topic.
Share examples and testimonies of other teachers using Wikipedia in the region. Teaching with Wikipedia is possible, evaluate with Wikipedia also.
To organized the course, its necessary to have virtual tutors. Divide the participants into different groups led by one tutor, who can track and answer all the doubts about the edition process.
Also it's important to have Wikipedians support during the edition period, they help us to maintain the quality content.
To close the MOOC, we encourage teachers to present a final project in which they design an activity using Wikimedia projects in the classrooms.
How we can maintain quality in Wikipedia from education projects? In Wikibridges, we suggest to organize activities in different steps so tutors and coordinators can track the editions before they publish them.

How we do it?

We ask participants which topics in Wikipedia they will like to edit. For example: arts, history, natural science, sports, human rights, gender gap, etc. With this data, the tutors organized a list of suggested articles that teachers can edit adding information and references. In this way, we guide them in their first steps reading Wikipedia as future editors.
We work with the new user in the sandbox, tracking the information they want to add in the article, we encourage mostly add new references actualizing content. After reviewing their sandbox, tutors gave a devolution and help teachers to make their first edition. Then teachers continue editing in relation to their study areas.

Wikibridges editions	Teachers involved 2014-2017	Articles improved	Educational projects created
6	More than 500	More than 1000	More than 100

Tags: Education, MOOCs, Teacher learnings, Wikipedia