Education/News/June 2018/What lecturers think about their first experience in the Basque Education Program
What lecturers think about their first experience in the Basque Education Program[edit]
Author: Galder Gonzalez
Summary:Basque Wikimedians User Group Education Program has made it’s first year and we have asked lecturers and professors what they think about the program, what they would improve and how the evaluate their student’s work and our job. Most of them would like to repeat next year, and they are quite happy with the idea, despite sensation of low level contribution by their students.
More than 40 professors have take part in this very first year, and half of them answered to our questions. Half of them asked students to make a group assignment, and also half of them were senior students. We found that fresh and sophomore courses lecturers were not so eager to participate in our program.
Asked about the exercise itself and the help they received to develop it, most gave positive to very positive answers, and also commented their satisfaction in other questions without grade selection. Tools (as the Dashboard) where not known by most, though, and didn’t make use of them. We need to improve this in the future.
When we asked about the grade of satisfaction with students’ assignments the answer varied, but they were lower than in all other answers. We think that lecturers are quite conservative in what can be published, and they didn’t want some editions to be even alive in public, even in Dashboards. We have talked to some professors in person about this, and they think that students are not good enough, but we think that they are used to peer-to-peer publication, where quality asessments are nearing perfection.
We also noticed that some professors thought this took more time than expected, while others less time than expected. This could be in part due to professors commitment with the idea or even their sense of correcting deeply something that could be read by others. We must research more on this, as we don’t want professors to take a bunch of work they can afford.
Interestingly enough, they think that students get skills with this assignments, and they deeply like the writing, communicating and technical skills. Nevertheless, then didn’t see that critical thinking was worked out with this exercise, and maybe this is a consequence of badly done reference work, something we have noted in articles.
Finally, we think that is a great success that 95% of professors wanted to repeat next year (while the others were not sure, but didn’t deny the option). Some lecturers are also suggesting colleagues to join us, and this week we made a meeting with 10 new and returning professors who wanted to learn more about Wikipedia’s use and possibilities.
Tags: evaluation, professors, university, assignment, Education Program