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User:Helaine (Wiki Ed)/Course onboarding checklist

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On-boarding checklist — for determining whether it is a Wiki Ed-supported course

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  • We know the maximum number of students expected in the course.
  • If there are more than 50 students in a general course (or between 35—50 in a medical/psychology course), the program manager will:
    • schedule a phone call and determine:
      • the instructor's experience either editing or teaching with Wikipedia
      • the amount of content the students are expected to add
      • the number of articles the students are expected to edit
      • the number of Teaching Assistants or co-instructors in the course
    • advise, based on this information, whether the assignment is too big for the instructor's experience
      • between 70—100 courses, the program manager will only approve the assignment if the students are working in groups, adding no new pages or significant content (e.g., writing a lead based on the existing content in the article), or adding a small amount of content after posting on the article talk page
  • If there are more than 50 students in a medical or psychology course, we have actively discouraged them from doing a Wikipedia assignment in this course.
  • If there are 100+ students expected in the course, the program manager has contacted the instructor to indicate why this will be a problem and that s/he needs to pull the Wikipedia assignment.
    • If the instructor still intends to do the assignment, the program manager will add any known details to the Education noticeboard to alert the community.
  • The instructor has indicated that students might edit medical/psychology articles.
    • mail the medical or psychology brochure to each student
    • follow up: will instructor actively discourage if the topic of the course is not primarily medical or psychology (e.g., an information studies or composition course)?
    • add a Wiki Ed category to the Course Page so WikiProject Med members can monitor if they want
  • Program manager has reviewed the course plan and assignment description?
    • We cross-referenced this description with our list of red flags (see below)?
  • Has the instructor included our online training as part of their assignment?
    • If not, the program manager has reached out to stress the importance of having all of their students go through it.
    • If they will not require it, the program manager has determined what other training methods they have in place and whether this sounds reasonable.
  • The instructor will have their students start work either in sandboxes or the article namespace—students will not use other off-line spaces like Word.
  • The students will still be in the class for at least a week after they publish live articles.

List of red flags

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  • size of class is over 50 students
  • may edit medical or psychology articles
  • instructor wants synthesis and original research
  • is not using a milestone assignment (with various deadlines and due dates)
  • students working off-wiki to develop content
  • no details about course
  • introductory/survey class for first-year or non-majors
  • controversial topics of study
  • no evident requirement for students to enroll on Course Page
  • does not address plagiarism and copyright violations
  • requirement to add media without media training materials
  • minimum word requirement
  • group accounts: one user account per group of students
  • fewer than 6 weeks devoted for a writing assignment
  • requiring DYK or GA status
  • students are graded based on what "sticks" on Wikipedia