Wikipedia talk:United States Education Program

New MediaWiki extension

I spy with my little eye something beginning with E... It's a MediaWiki extension for the tracking of students developed under contract for the Foundation. It comes complete with a whole pile of new user groups and special pages. More information is available at mw:File:Engineering support for the Wikipedia Education Program.pdf and mw:Wikipedia Education Program. The extension aims to obsolete some Toolserver hacks and move the management of student tables from public wiki pages to possibly private special pages.

The design specifications in the PDF and MediaWiki pages contradict some of the feedback from the community:

• "Professors neither have the time nor the incentive to learn the nitty gritty details of how MediaWiki works. Their focus is on using Wikipedia as a teaching tool, not teaching or learning Wikipedia."
• "With the number of students enrolled in the program growing at a fast rate we need an automated process in place."
• There is heavy emphasis on how this extension makes things easier for the Foundation and the organizers and consequently very little on the benefits for the community.
• "We don’t want to share the data about the students with the public"
• "All data accessible via the API (to those who have sufficient privileges)" (emphasis added)
• Yet again, I am notifying the community about this when it should be the Foundation who is doing so.

I see this as really bad news. MER-C 04:15, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

The documents are a little ambiguous and don't make it entirely clear whether the aim is to hide all student lists and means of tracking the students from public view, but if that is the aim then yes this would be an extremely bad idea. Hut 8.5 11:26, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Blog post from developer and another design document. Sigh. MER-C 01:40, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

It could turn out to be a very nice tool --Guerillero | My Talk 02:26, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

I hope so, e.g. obtaining a list of all students through a painless API query. I just don't have enough confidence in the WMF to believe that. MER-C 08:15, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Roadmap - deployment = mid/late February. MER-C 08:15, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Anyone have a stable copy of it? I'm trying to install it on my local wiki, and I'm getting loads of syntax errors (because its still under development). But, their testing wiki seems to have a working copy. Anyone know how to get hold of that (If you know how to download all files in this directory tree, that would work, too) ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 11:54, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Recursive wget can download directory trees (I'm guessing you've already tried checking out the SVN repository). MER-C 02:45, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Yep, you guessed right, I already tried the mw SVN, as well as ExtensionDistributor (I think they should give the same files anyways). I don't have unix, but I did find a windows version, and it works! I'll mess around with the extension a bit and see what it does... Thanks! ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 07:21, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Ah, well. I didn't realize that all the .php pages look like this when viewed through the directory tree, so I got a bunch of useless stuff. Looks like I'll have to wait till they fix the bugs ( I tried fixing them myself, but for every bug I fix, a new one crops up; and I have no idea what I'm doing anyways since I'm unfamiliar with the code) ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 07:31, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

December Wikipedia Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting

If you're interested in learning more about the Wikipedia Education Program in action around the globe, join us for the next Metrics and Activities Meeting on Tuesday, December 20 at 16:00 UTC. Please visit outreachwiki:Wikipedia Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting for instructions on joining and time zone conversions. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 22:27, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

New Participation Requirements

Just a note to alert those interested that we've created new Wikipedia Education Program Participation Requirements for all courses in all countries participating in the Wikipedia Education Program this term, based on feedback we've seen from pilot programs in multiple countries. These new requirements take effect immediately, so courses participating in spring 2012 have been crafted around these requirements. More information is available on the Outreach wiki, linked above. Please direct any comments about the requirements to that talk page.

Please note that these are global requirements for participation in the Wikipedia Education Program in spring 2012. Individual country programs such as this one may develop additional requirements as-needed (for example, the Cairo Pilot will have an even lower Ambassador:student ratio).

On behalf of the entire Wikipedia Education Program team, -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 19:28, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Education Program/Teahouse Partnership

Quick update: the US/Canada Education Programs are planning to partner with a new pilot program from the Wikimedia Foundation this semester. You can read about the Teahouse project's goals and see how they align with those of the Wikipedia Education Program. Perhaps most noticeably, both programs serve to help new editors contribute quality content to Wikipedia while fostering an environment that will encourage them to stick around in the future.

The Education Program will be partnering with their project by using the Teahouse hosts in place of Online Ambassadors for five courses in the US/Canada. As many of you know, the ambassador requirement has increased this semester, and many classes will not meet these requirements to join the program officially. However, we would like to choose five of these courses to receive the support of the Teahouse hosts, which will still give students online support but in a different setting than we have traditionally utilized.

We are partnering with five courses because this will give the Teahouse program a solid support of new editors to work with over the next few months but will not drastically impact the Education Program. We are still working with those professors who do not have the traditional Online Ambassador yet, as we want to make sure these professors are interested in receiving this alternative support for their students.

The Teahouse fellows will be in the San Francisco office next week, so we will select the five courses at that point. We will be focusing on courses that are only lacking a Wikipedian in the pod (aka: they must still have a Campus Ambassador) and will select the five courses based on interest/enthusiasm from the professor. We will also be taking into consideration the number of female students, as one of the Teahouse's main goals is to reach more female editors.

Please comment with any suggestions for selecting the courses (from this list of classes that still need Online Ambassador support) or any feedback about working with the Teahouse in general. I will post the courses as soon as they agree to join the Teahouse pilot. Looking forward to your input. JMathewson (WMF) (talk) 23:46, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

A class at New Jersey Institute of Technology is on board to work with the Teahouse as well as USEP. JMathewson (WMF) (talk) 19:46, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

A professor at Alverno College has two classes participating in the pilot.

A Political Research class at Winona State is also participating.

A gender and economic develop class at University of Utah will be participating in the Teahouse Pilot.

A class at University of Toronto will also join the pilot. JMathewson (WMF) (talk) 22:58, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Program Structure Working Group

Please take note of an in-person meeting that, pending approval, will be taking place in the San Francisco WMF office on the weekend of March 22-25, 2012. This event will serve to bring together active community members who taken leadership opportunities in the Education Program with WMF staff to rebuild a volunteer structure that defines roles and delegates responsibilities related to the Education Programs in the US and Canada. The goal of the weekend is to create a community-driven foundation of the US/Canada Education Programs that will address specific concerns, such as expansion techniques, ambassador recruitment, community relationships, etc.

I will select the final list of 10 participants. The group of attendees will be selected based on a number of criteria, including:

• demonstrated leadership within the Education Program in the past

• Steering Committee members
• Regional Ambassadors
• Other Campus/Online Ambassadors who have gone above and beyond the expectations of the Ambassador Program

• cost of travel and lodging, based on an approved budget
• preliminary ideas for how a volunteer structure could work

If you are interested in contributing to a productive meeting that will greatly impact the US and Canada Education Programs, please fill out the following form explaining why you think you could help in this endeavor. Please do not fill out the form if you are not available to travel to San Francisco March 22-25 (and potentially traveling a day before or after that). If this event is approved, travel and hotel costs, as well as some meals, will be covered or reimbursed by the Wikimedia Foundation. If you have any pertinent questions unanswered here, please either post below, on my talk page or email me at jmathewsonwikimedia.org.

In order to make travel arrangements that are cost-effective, please fill out the interest form by 9AM Pacific on Monday, February 27, 2012. JMathewson (WMF) (talk) 20:01, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

Ambassadors/volunteers, I want to update those of you who were interested in the outcome of this event but have not indicated interest (in which case, you should receive an email from me). We have discussed and finally decided that these meetings are going to so drastically impact the US and Canadian Education Programs that we would like to make sure it's as well-planned-out as possible. We will postpone such an event to an undecided time in the near future. Thank you so much to all of you who have taken time to show interest and think about how to restructure the program. I have heard you and appreciate all you continue to do for the program. I hope each of you will still be interested in participating in the future conversation and will keep everyone updated on any further discussion. JMathewson (WMF) (talk) 01:42, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

Beta testers needed for new MediaWiki extension

Some of you may have heard about a new Wikipedia Education Program MediaWiki extension that's been in development for a few months. This new tool will completely replace the existing course page and Ambassador listing system beginning in Fall 2012.

Some key features of the new extension:

• Ambassadors will create a profile in the system and associate themselves with classes, meaning there's no updating information on what class you're helping with three different pages each term.
• Professors will create standardized course pages through this system once they've been given the "instructor" user right, meaning we will ensure that all professors have gone through an orientation on best practices for using Wikipedia in the classroom before creating a course page.
• Students will use an enrollment token to add themselves to the course page, meaning we will have an up-do-date, database-driven list of student usernames (anyone involved in the Pune Pilot will know how important this is).

We'll be talking a lot more about this extension in the coming weeks and months as it's rolled out and we begin using it. Currently, we are ready to have the first beta testers use the tool, and we are looking for 3-5 Ambassadors and professors who are willing to spend a few hours over the next week doing a thorough test of the new extension. We specifically want people who are experienced in creating course pages and adding themselves to the Ambassador lists. We have two goals for this version of the beta test:

1. Determine if the new extension is lacking a major functionality that Ambassadors and professors rely upon in the current system.
2. Find bugs in the new extension.

In later rounds, we'll be looking at user experience and more bug testing, but this preliminary round is focused exclusively on back-end issues while we still have developer time to fix them.

If you are interested in helping out with beta-testing, we will have a kickoff meeting on Google Hangout on Monday, February 27, with Jeroen De Dauw (the developer) and Frank Schulenburg (who has served as the project manager for this extension) where they'll explain a bit more about the tool and what they need for this round of beta testing. Please sign up on this Doodle if you're interested in helping out, or if you're interested in a larger beta testing later, please indicate that on the Ambassadors talk page. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 20:21, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

Followed users

Hi all,

Following a village pump proposal discussion I implemented a new tool Followed users which lets you view the most recent edit by a selected list of users that you follow. One important application of this is to allow ambassadors and professors to follow their students and review their work in a timely manner. I'd like to get more people to try it out and let me know at my talk page if you find it useful or have suggestions/problems. Thanks! Dcoetzee 02:58, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Are you aware that the online ambassadors may be incompetent? Please see Talk:Douglas W. Owsley/GA1, the evaluation of an article submitted by an editor who says on her user page: "I am an Online Ambassador, member of the Ambassador Selection Team, and member of the Ambassador Steering Committee. I have worked with university professors and students through the Public Policy Initiative over the past year and attended the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit in July 2011, to assist with expanding the project to the global community. I am now part of the Wikipedia Education Program, with an emphasis on the United States and Canada." This is an editor who doesn't understand that there is a problem with close paraphrasing and plagiarism. What possible "help" could she be giving professors and students? MathewTownsend (talk) 03:15, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Although I understand your frustration, the problem of selecting qualified OAs is quite entirely unrelated to this topic. Dcoetzee 03:21, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

well, what is it related to? Everyplace I've asked has turned out to be a blind alley, including the WMF people who say they don't know much about it. Who does? MathewTownsend (talk) 03:23, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

You're going to want to contact the Online Ambassador selection team. They can also be reached by e-mail at online-ambassadors-en (at) lists.wikimedia.org. Another possible fairly active venue is Wikipedia talk:Online Ambassadors. Dcoetzee 04:03, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Tracking student edits is like herding cats! Your tool would have been a great help when I was doing just that. [Biology Project]. A bit late for me... but still much appreciated.--JimmyButler (talk) 15:36, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Welcome Rob Schnautz, new Education Program community liaison

I'm really pleased to announce that Rob Schnautz has joined the Wikipedia Education Program team as an online communications contractor. Rob has been editing Wikipedia as User:Bob the Wikipedian since 2006, and he self-identifies as a WikiDragon, working mostly with the Tree of Life WikiProject. He also helped develop the automatic taxobox system. In 2011, he became the Regional Ambassador for part of the Midwest, and he joins the team now to serve as a liaison between the existing English Wikipedia editing community and the Education Program team.

This means I'll be less active on talk pages and IRC and return to a traditional communications role (writing blog posts, outreach to news media, etc.). Rob will now be the program's primary point of contact on-wiki; if you have questions, feel free to reach out to him either on program talk pages like this one or on his talk page. Welcome, Rob! -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 22:29, 6 March 2012 (UTC)