Education Extension scheduled shutdown

Summary: The Education Extension will be shut down by June 2018.

As many of you know, the education team at WMF has been promoting the use of the Programs & Events Dashboard to organize and track on-wiki assignments. This tool has come to replace the MediaWiki Education Extension. Over the years, many issues have been uncovered from our engineering colleagues with the extension, including security concerns. For this reason, and with a viable alternative platform, we are starting the process to deprecate the extension and have it uninstalled where it has been activated.

It is now time to move forward and stop using the Education Extension. This means that the following steps will be taken:

New programs are discouraged from using the extension and encouraged to use the Programs and Events Dashboard.
Current ongoing programs will be supported, until the month of June, 2018.
On June 30, 2018, the Education Extension will be shut down.

If you are still running an education program that uses the Education Extension, please take the appropriate measures and also reach out to your colleagues and communities so they are also aware. The education team will be reaching out to individual wiki communities that use the extension with this message as well.

We also want to invite all Education Program Leaders to take the online training for the dashboard so that you can benefit from this tool and make your work easier. (Did you know you can also use it at edit-a-thons and writing competitions? Pretty cool, huh?)

More training courses for the dashboard are available at https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/training, so take a look!

If you have comments or questions, please reach out to the education team or dashboard at wikimedia.org.

Tags: Education Extension