Education/Newsletter/April 2015/Quarterly update from the education team

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By Samir Elsharbaty (WMF)

Snippet: Upates from the education team quarter3 2015 in supporting programs around the world.

In quarter 3, January to March 2015, education programs witnessed great success made by Wikipedia community and supported by the education team. In this quarter to the education team joined the new Community Engagement team.

Mentorship

In three months the 4 education team members were happy to reach out and be reached by 100 community members in 53 countries around the world. Nearly half of these connections were initiated by the team members while the other half were initiated by the community. The constant connection with volunteers led to better plans, advice, contact sharing and news sharing. Wikipedia Education Collaborative volunteer members also participated in mentoring their fellow volunteers in the movement as four of the collab members were able help 11 volunteers during this quarter.

Arab World

Arab World students continued to add massive amounts of content to the Arabic Wikipedia as well as raising the number of featured and good articles. Also, in WikiArabia 2015, the first ever Arabic Wikipedia community conference, big part of the event program was dedicated to education as it was of great interest to both the speakers and the audience. By the end of quarter 3, the education team was getting ready for a visit to Oman that will take place in early May to research a possible government partnership and a pilot education program there.

Spanish-speaking countries

Staff paid a visit to Mexico to attend a series of successful editathons held at Tec de Moterrey and to participate in celebrating their great success throughout the last year. Volunteers in Tec de Monterrey are also getting ready to help coordinate for the Wikimania education pre-conference held before Wikimania 2015 in Mexico city. In Uruguay too, the first edition of Wikipedia Education Program was wrapped up with remarkable results. Other countries were exerting other notable efforts in supporting Wikipedia in Education.

Resources

Inspired by program leaders and by the help of their collaboration, the L&E and the Education teams were able to launch the Education Program Toolkit, with 22 content pages and 46 learning patterns. The education toolkit is meant to be a helping tool for program leaders and initiators regardless of the amount of experience they have with Wikipedia Education Program.

Communications
Increase in newsletter page views

The education newsletter has developed dramatically throughout the last year in terms of content, participation and readership due to the great effort community added into it in collaboration with the education team that helps coordinating and publishing it. Number and size of posts has grown in Q3 compared to the same quarter last year. Also the community participation witnessed a 125% increase over 2013/2014. The most significant number came from the pageviews of March this year which has recorded a 900% increase compared to March 2014. Wikipedia Education Program joined facebook in February with a group that found a significant turnout by the program participants from around the world.