Education/Newsletter/February 2015/New education toolkit to help program leaders develop their programs at all levels
By Samir Elsharbaty (WMF) and Anna Koval (WMF)
Snippet: The first program toolkit has been launched to help program leaders start, develop, and grow their education programs.
the Learning & Evaluation team and the Education team at the Wikimedia Foundation, together with the Wikipedia Education Collaborative launched the first program toolkit: the Education Program Toolkit.
Using knowledge shared and collected over the past decade, the education toolkit contains resources and strategies that volunteers have tested and refined through their practice.
The education toolkit aims at helping program leaders find the best practices when designing and implementing a new idea. The tips were gleaned from the experiences and expertise of education program leaders around the world.
Walking the reader through the process step-by-step, the toolkit tackles the common issues that a program initiator would face: from the beginning, when planning a program and looking for partnerships to help with implementing ideas, through finding resources and strategies to help with assignment design and program management.
Efforts made earlier in 2014 by the WMF's global education team to study the existing education programs around the world in 66 countries revealed several facts that paved the way for the development of this toolkit, which would be a repository of new solutions to help program leaders. 71% of content added by students went to Wikipedia while almost a third, 29%, was added to other sister projects. 60% of participants are in fact university students, but the remaining third are secondary school students (20%) and teacher training programs (13%). This mapping was shared in the team’s Quarterly Review and on the program's public dashboard.
Communicating with other programs around the world by sharing your experiences in a blog post, a newsletter post or a learning pattern, and learning from other experiences shared by the same ways, helps ideas travel from one country to another and get developed by new volunteers. This collaborative movement is always open and looking forward to your participation.
Visit the Education Toolkit on Meta wiki here.
Learn about the Education Toolkit on Outreach wiki here.