This month, we will embark on a new way of bringing the different parts of the Global Education Program together: We are going to host the first “Global Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting”. The goal of this meeting will be to share our experiences in the field of university outreach and we invite all chapters representatives and interested volunteers to join us on October 25, 2011.

Some background: a growing number of volunteers in different countries is engaged in getting students to share their knowledge with others on Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation has supported the creation of education programs in the United States, in India, and in Canada so far. When I talked to Wikipedians at Wikimania this year, many of them told me that they were eager to start a program on their Wikipedia language version. And we know from conversations with professors in a couple of countries that they are interested in using Wikipedia in their classes as well.

But how do we prevent people from reinventing the wheel? How can we make sure that best practices and lessons learned get shared across different cultures?

I truly believe: It’s not only a good thing to have a diverse approach to how we set up the Education Program in different countries – it’s essential. At the same time it would be great to learn from each other’s experiences. So, here is what I propose: let’s do it the Wikipedia way: collaborative and transparent. Let’s get together in a monthly meeting.

I’ve started a page on the Outreach Wiki to collect your thoughts about what you’d be interested in hearing during this monthly meeting:

http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_Education_Program_Metrics_and_Activities_Meeting

If you’re interested in joining this meeting, please add your name to the participants list. Anything else you think is important? Just let me know.

I look forward to your feedback.

Frank

The first generation of Wikipedia Ambassadors participated in a survey when the Public Policy Initiative wrapped up this summer. More than 80 respondents (over half of the 2010-2011 Ambassadors!) provided input about their experiences and how to improve the program. Many Wikimedia Foundation blog followers are probably familiar with the Initiative’s development of the Ambassador Program to open Wikipedia to the academic community. Ambassadors come in two flavors: Campus Ambassadors, who provide a face for Wikipedia on university campuses, and Online Ambassadors, who support the new student editors on wiki as they make their first contributions.

The graphs illustrate the Ambassadors’ role and motivations, based on the survey results.
 

While both Campus and Online Ambassadors identified their role as helping newcomers, their motivations diverged. Online Ambassadors were strongly motivated by helping newcomers, and Campus Ambassadors were strongly motivated by increasing Wikipedia credibility and use on university campuses. Both Campus and Online Ambassadors felt responsible first to the students they were working with and second to the Wikipedia community. Ambassadors agreed on the Public Policy Initiative outcomes:

1. Wikipedia content improved.
2. Use of Wikipedia as a teaching tool increased.
3. Ambassadors provided support for college-educated newcomers.
4. There was an increase of Wikipedia’s credibility among academia.

Through the survey, many Ambassadors shared their most memorable experiences in the program. Some of the highlights include:

• “I showed a student how to check the page view statistics. Hundreds of people had seen his article since he created it. What an immediate impact he had! He was blown away.”
• “For me it was an honor to have a student participant who was also a US Congressman and to help improve his Wikipedia article.”
• “My favorite story is of a non-traditional age student telling me that her son’s 8th grade teacher told the class not to use Wikipedia because it can not be trusted. Our student told her son what she had learned about neutral-voice and verifiability and community scholarship. At the end of the semester her son told her that his middle-school teacher now says it’s okay to use Wikipedia as a place to start looking for information… I sure would like to know what that 8th grader told his teacher about his Mom’s academic Wikipedia experience.”

Check out the pages for the Wikipedia Ambassador Program and Global Education Program to find out more about our program.

Amy Roth
Research Analyst, Public Policy Initiative 

In June, I travelled to India to kick off the Global Education Program‘s pilot in Pune. There, I met people who said: “I am a big fan of Wikipedia, but I am not good at writing. I always wondered if there are other ways I could help Wikipedia to improve.”

Ram Shankar Yadav volunteered to be the Campus Ambassador Coordinator in Pune.

We invited those people to become Wikipedia Ambassadors to teach others how to start editing. The beauty of the Wikipedia Ambassador Program is that it provides Wikipedia volunteer opportunities that don’t involve editing. People who aren’t article writers might be good at teaching others. They might have skills that we desperately need to get more people excited about Wikipedia and to fill the many gaps in content that still exist. Just look at the enthusiasm of the new Pune Campus Ambassadors that comes through in these video interviews.

Ram Shankar Yadav is a great example. Ram had never edited Wikipedia before. He was always a fan of the free encyclopedia, but he wasn’t drawn to editing the content. When he heard about the opportunity to become a Campus Ambassador, he jumped at the chance to volunteer his teaching skills in support of the encyclopedia he loved. Now, Ram has stepped into a leadership role in the India Education Program, serving as a key on-the-ground organizer of the Pune Ambassadors.

It was openness that made Wikipedia a success story. With a simple click on the edit button, you could change its content. That’s what distinguished Wikipedia from Nupedia back in 2001 and that’s how it became the biggest encyclopedia ever. Openness is critical for our future, too.

To stay successful, I firmly believe Wikipedia needs to be open and welcoming to newcomers who want to edit, but also to people who fill in other roles in our movement. People who are not part of the editing community, but who are eager to help Wikipedia in other ways – people like Ram.

Frank Schulenburg
Global Education Program Director

As we make the transition from the Public Policy Initiative to the Global Education Program, we are relying more on volunteers to keep our project sustainable. In the United States, some of the Global Education Program’s most hard-working volunteers this summer are the Regional Ambassadors.

As we expand the U.S.-based offerings in the Global Education Program, the Regional Ambassadors play the critical role of recruiting for campus-based activities. They help instructors interested in having their students edit Wikipedia for class learn more about what the program can offer, and they work to recruit people for the Campus Ambassador role and also coordinate getting the Campus Ambassadors all adequately trained. At the moment, Regional Ambassadors are taking the main leadership role in planning nine different Campus Ambassador trainings that will happen across the United States over the next few weeks.

Regional Ambassadors plan activities to encourage professors in their regions to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool in higher education classrooms.

Meet the current crop of Regional Ambassadors:

• Chanitra Bishop (User:Etlib) is the Instruction & Emerging Technologies Librarian at Indiana University Bloomington and an experienced Campus Ambassador who has helped with two terms of classes at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a co-leader of the Great Lakes region.
• Tom Cloyd (User:Tomcloyd) is an experienced Wikipedian with professional training in human psychology (which he has found highly useful in his recruitment efforts!). He leads the Great West region.
• Derrick Coetzee (User:Dcoetzee) is an experienced Wikimedian, a Campus Ambassador who supports San Francisco Bay Area classes, and the unofficial photographer for recent Wikipedia Global Education Program events. He is a co-leader of the Pacifica region.
• Bryan Cox (User:Manumitany) is a law student with extensive experience in community/political organizing and in coordinating volunteers. Bryan leads the Skyplains region.
• Max Klein (User:Maximilianklein) participated in the Public Policy Initiative as both a course instructor and a Campus Ambassador in the San Francisco Bay Area, and has contributed many creative ideas to the program. He leads the New England region.
• Richard Knipel (User:Pharos) is actively involved with the Wikimedia New York chapter, and served as a Campus Ambassador to New York University in spring 2011. He leads the Metropolis region.
• Rob Pongsajapan (User:Pongr) is a new media designer at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown University, where he has also been a Campus Ambassador for two terms. He leads the Nation’s Capital region.
• Rob Schnautz (User:Bob_the_Wikipedian) is an experienced Wikipedian with stunning organization abilities. He’s a co-leader of the Great Lakes region.
• Matt Senate (User:Mattsenate) has, like Max, served as both a course instructor and a Campus Ambassador in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is very active in the free culture movement. Matt co-leads the Pacifica region.
• Dylan Staley (User:Dylanstaley) is a peer mentor at Louisiana State University’s Communication Across the Curriculum office, while also serving as a Campus Ambassador at that university. Dylan leads the Texarkana region and is serving as the interim Regional Ambassador for the South as well.
• Alex Stinson (User:Sadads) is an experienced Campus Ambassador at James Madison University, a longtime Wikipedian, an Online Ambassador, the founder of a Wikipedia student club at James Madison University, and a key player in outreach activities to universities in the U.K. He leads the Greater Chesapeake region.

We honestly couldn’t do it without them, so a HUGE round of thanks to our Regional Ambassadors!

The Regional Ambassador model is debuting with the United States, but as we start to grow our programs in Canada, India, Germany, Brazil, the U.K., and other countries around the globe, we anticipate developing Regional Ambassadors for those locations as well. In the U.S., the plan is to gradually reduce the size of each region so that activities in each region are more local and less time-intensive.

If you’re interested in learning more about using Wikipedia in higher education classrooms, fill out this interest form and the appropriate Regional Ambassador will get in touch. Fill out the form, too, if you’re interested in becoming a Regional Ambassador yourself.

–
LiAnna Davis
Global Education Program Communications Manager

It’s good that some people (and I consider myself part of this group) get hooked on editing Wikipedia. We stay around for years, we become part of the community, we go to meetups, and most of all, we do an amazing amount of work to make Wikipedia better. Let’s get this out of the way first – Wikipedia can’t exist without those dedicated people.

Is this the only way of being a part of Wikipedia? My answer is no. I truly believe that there are also other ways of helping Wikipedia to get better.

Back in 2005, when I started to think about ways how to improve Wikipedia, I was asking myself: how can we encourage a larger number of knowledgeable people to edit articles? People who stick around, who become Wikipedians, people like me and all the others who spend endless hours on research and writing.

Over the years, we tried many different things to make this vision come true. We held workshops, organized Wikipedia Academies, gave presentations and offered prizes for outstanding articles. We reached out to academics as well as to senior citizens. Most of these things didn’t work as well as we initially thought.

When we started reaching out to university students last year, we tried something different. It was explicitly not our goal to turn all those students into Wikipedians. We knew they would edit Wikipedia as part of their class and only a couple of them would stay. Because being a long-term member of the community requires a specific kind of mindset – and honestly: not everybody has that mindset. Some people just enjoy editing Wikipedia for a short time of their life and then carry on with other activities.

What we are attempting in our Global Education Program instead, is to institutionalize the use of Wikipedia in the classroom. Our goal is to explain to as many teachers as possible what the benefits of using Wikipedia of a teaching tool are. Students are much more motivated when they write for a global audience, instead of just writing for their professor. Some of the students participating in our program over the last year were so proud of their work that they sent links to the articles they improved to their grandparents. Amazing! When have you heard of students who sent their term papers to their grandparents? And not only are those students more motivated, they also improve their media literacy skills, they learn how to use a wiki, and they improve their research, writing, and critical thinking skills.

As we carry on with the Global Education Program, every semester a new cohort of students will learn how to edit. They will upload pictures, improve articles, and learn how to use talk pages. Some of them will come back later and apply those skills. They will help us to take another step on the way to make Wikipedia better. Most of them will never become members of the community. I believe that’s ok. Because Wikipedia is not only about being a member of the club – it’s about building the biggest and best encyclopedia ever.

Frank (club member)

Our new Global Education Program brings with it a lot of new terminology. What better way to organize an overview than in A–Z?

Ambassadors: When we started thinking about how to involve universities in the improvement of Wikipedia articles back in 2009, it became clear that we won’t be successful without offering various kinds of support. We decided to create a new role for people who are both eager and qualified to help new contributors to get around the many difficulties of editing Wikipedia. The Wikipedia Ambassador Program started in the summer of 2010, when we recruited the first Campus and Online Ambassadors for the English Wikipedia. Today it’s a great way for people to become engaged even if they don’t have a long history of Wikipedia editing. All you need is an affinity to teaching, the willingness to help others and a friendly attitude. That opens the Wikipedia movement up for people who are eager to help and who had few opportunities for doing so in the past.

Bookshelf: Teaching students how to use Wikipedia is hard without instructional materials. Back in 2006 we only had the “Wikipedia Cheatsheet,” a one-pager that listed the most common wiki markup tags. That’s why we started the Bookshelf Project in 2009. Now, it contains a wide variety of brochures and videos that explain how to start editing. Most popular among teachers are the “Welcome to Wikipedia” and “Evaluating Wikipedia article quality” brochures. By the way: all printed materials have been created with Scribus, an open source desktop publishing application, so they can be translated and adapted by people all over the world.

Campus Ambassadors: Campus Ambassadors provide in-person support on the university campus. They get a 2-day training to learn all the nuts and bolts of what they have to teach. Our Campus Ambassadors come from a variety of different backgrounds. Some of them are librarians, some are students, and some are teachers. They all share a common goal: to help newcomers with their first steps on Wikipedia.

Fellows: We started a Wikipedia Teaching Fellows Program for educators participating in the Public Policy Initiative in 2011. Professors who fulfill the Teaching Fellow requirements are able to put the distinction on their C.V. to indicate the work they’ve done with Wikipedia in their classrooms. At our Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit in July 2011, we were able to honor the first 20 official Wikipedia Teaching Fellows.

Global Education Program: The class-based university program as explored in the Public Policy Initiative has been highly successful in turning students into Wikipedia contributors. We have built a strong knowledge base about running a class-based program as well as the tools needed to implement it (training handbooks, brochures on how to start editing, how-to videos, sample syllabi, etc.) We are now at a point to make these investments pay off. That’s why we are starting a Global Education Program. The Global Education Program will support the Foundation’s strategic goal to grow and strengthen the Wikipedia editor community.

Higher Education Summit: Our first Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit took place on July 7–9, 2011. More than 120 teachers, librarians, Wikipedia Ambassadors, and Foundation staff members came together in Boston to celebrate the successes of the Public Policy Initiative. For the participants, the three days were a great opportunity to share their skills, best practices and success stories with each other. We received a lot of positive feedback and we hope that this was the first of many Wikipedia Higher Education Summits to be held in different countries around the globe.

India Education Program: In June 2011, we started our India Education Program in Pune, Maharashtra. Pune is a vibrant university city with more than a hundred educational institutes. We quickly learned that the interest from Indian teachers in our program is as big as the interest in the U.S. That’s why we are estimating that more than 700 students will participate in Wikipedia-editing activities in the first semester. Most of them will edit the English Wikipedia, but some of them are also planning to write articles on the Maharati Wikipedia.

K-12: We know that university students make great contributors to Wikipedia. Some say, “students are the fuel of Wikipedia.” But what about high school students? We’ve received some inquiries from high school teachers who would like to adopt our model and let their students edit Wikipedia as part of the classroom activities. That’s why we will run a small pilot in the spring term 2012 to see whether this idea is worth further exploration.

Numbers: In the first two semesters of our educational program activities, more than 800 students contributed about 5,600 pages of high quality content to the English Wikipedia. Our research has shown that Wikipedia articles written by those students improved by an average of 140 percent. By 2013, we are planning to have more than 10,000 students enrolled in our Education Program.

Online Ambassadors: Whereas the Campus Ambassadors provide in-person support, the Online Ambassadors help students on wiki and on a dedicated IRC channel. Most of our Online Ambassadors are long-term Wikipedians who can answer almost every question related to the technical aspects of editing, Wikipedia culture and processes. Students have told us that the mentoring from Online Ambassadors has been “tremendously helpful” for understanding Wikipedia and for making the first edits.

Public Policy Initiative: A 17-month experimental pilot program that started in the summer of 2010. We decided to run our pilot with a narrow topical focus (“If we can do it with public policy, we will be able to do it with any other topic as well”) and limited to U.S. universities. Now, as we are flooded with requests from educators outside of public policy, and we have a model that works effectively, we are transitioning the Public Policy Initiative to the new Global Education Program. Our goal is to apply our learnings in the U.S. to other disciplines and countries and to expand the use of Wikipedia in higher education globally. We see this as a continuous effort to strengthen and diversify Wikipedia’s editing community.

Regional Ambassadors: When we started the Public Policy Initiative, one of our main goals was to make the program self-sustainable. That’s why we created the role of Regional Ambassadors. Whereas Foundation staff members recruited professors and Campus Ambassadors in the beginning, it’s now up to the volunteers. The Regional Ambassador role is a leadership role with great opportunities for developing team management, community organizing, and public outreach skills. It also provides participants with significant professional-networking opportunities, especially in the education community and the open-source community.

Student clubs: Wikipedia student clubs pretty much emerged without the Foundation being involved. The first student club in the U.S. started at the University of Michigan in June 2010. Most student clubs hold monthly meetings where students can have a place to both learn and teach each other how to edit Wikimedia projects, and to discuss their edits with each other.

Trainers: Some of our Campus Ambassadors get an additional 2-day training so they can train the next generation of Campus Ambassadors. Those Campus Ambassador Trainers play an important role in our program activities: as volunteers they organize and lead local training events to ensure that the next cohort of Ambassadors acquires the same skills as they did. They also provide valuable feedback that helps improve the training.

Women: One of our strategic goals is to encourage more women to start editing Wikipedia. Our activities at universities offer a great opportunity to do so: more than half of the students in the U.S. (as well as in a large number of other countries) are female. And, of course, we are proud that more than 45% of our Campus Ambassadors are women as well.

Join the discussion about Wikimedia and education by subscribing to the Education listserv.

Frank Schulenburg
Global Education Program Director

In July 2006, Andy Carvin, host of the PBS blog learning.now, examined the attitude of teachers toward using Wikipedia in the classroom. [1] He asked: “Are educators hostile to Wikipedia?”. The answers ranged from one high school teacher who told Andy “Most colleagues had never seen Wikipedia, never intended to go there, and some had already warned their students that they were not to use Wikipedia for class projects” to another teacher who objected “I use Wikipedia all the time as a quick way to get a first pass on a subject I’m not familiar with, and I don’t see any reason why students shouldn’t be taught to use it the same way.” Most of the participants were arguing about whether their students should use Wikipedia as a source of information, not whether the students should contribute to it.

Carvin had already pointed out in 2005 that asking students to actively contribute to Wikipedia might be a model worth exploring [2]. Now, he stated: “It may be just a matter of time before we see highly organized educational activities, with teams of students from around the world working together to improve the quality of content on Wikipedia.” [1]

The past year

The past year has shown that those educational activities that Andy Carvin was envisioning in 2005 can be an effective means of improving Wikipedia’s quality. Building on the experiences of teachers like Jon Beasley-Murray (Was introducing Wikipedia to the classroom an act of madness leading only to mayhem if not murder?) and others, the Wikimedia Foundation started an experimental pilot project (the Public Policy Initiative) to explore the challenges and opportunities of student-based Wikipedia-editing on a larger scale. More than 800 students from 22 U.S. universities contributed about 5,600 pages of high quality content to the English Wikipedia. Articles written by those students improved by an average of 140 percent. Moreover, our pilot project sparked a high level of interest from media and teachers around the world.

Over the initial 12 months of the pilot project, we have built a strong knowledge base about running a class-based program as well as the tools needed to implement it (training handbooks, brochures on how to start editing, how-to videos, sample syllabi, etc.) We have also recruited and trained Wikipedia Ambassadors, whose role is to teach students about the basics of Wikipedia and to support them with their first edits. We are now at a point to make these investments pay off.

The Global Education Program and the year ahead

Beginning in 2011, we will expand Wikipedia editing in university classrooms to institutions around the world. That’s what we call the “Global Education Program”. It will support the Wikimedia Foundation’s strategic goal to grow, strengthen, and increase the Wikipedia editor community. It will also improve Wikipedia’s quality and increase Wikipedia’s credibility within academia.

Our priorities for expansion in year one will be India and Brazil, and we will also start activities in a couple of other countries. Whereas the Public Policy Initiative had a narrow topical focus, the new Global Education Program will encourage teachers from all disciplines to engage their students in Wikipedia editing.

What are the big challenges we are going to tackle in year one?

• Scalability. Based on the current growth, we are planning to have more than 10,000 students enrolled in our program by 2013. That means that we will need a much larger number of Wikipedia Campus and Online Ambassadors to support teachers and students. Therefore, we are planning to move the Ambassador training online and explore new models of letting volunteers take ownership of the program.

• Standards and guidelines. For a global volunteer-driven program like ours, it will be important that all participants have a shared understanding of what the goals are and how we are planning to achieve these goals. That’s where standards and guidelines come into play. The education systems and the culture of education varies from country to country, and we aim at being as flexible as possible in the implementation of our model. At the same time, we need to make sure that the quality of our support for teachers and students meets the same standards globally.

• Communication. At the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit last month, we have seen how powerful it can be when participants of our program share their experiences and learnings with each other. Our goal for the next year will be to give volunteers a stronger voice in storytelling and also to develop tools that enable participants to share their materials and best practices more effectively.

For me, the year ahead is the next step toward the vision that Andy Carvin outlined in 2005. Wikipedia belongs in Higher Education. And it’s not a matter of time anymore that students from around the world will work together to improve the quality of content on Wikipedia. The future of Wikipedia in Education is now.

Frank Schulenburg
Global Education Program Director

[1] http://www.pbs.org/teachers/learning.now/2006/07/wikipedia_in_the_classroom_con.html
[2] http://www.andycarvin.com/?p=738