School of Open offers free Wikipedia course

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Students lean in to learn about Wikipedia. Photo by Ellis Christopher, licensed CC BY.

Pete Forsyth, an early designer of the Wikipedia Education Program, is now teaching a free online course on Wikipedia and Open Educational Resources, along with Wikipedian and education researcher Sara Frank Bristow. The six-week course, “Writing Wikipedia Articles,” recently concluded its first run, and will be offered again starting 14 May (Americas)/15 May (Asia/Australia). You can enroll here.
The course was born of Communicate OER, a project that seeks to activate the Open Educational Resources community to improve and update Wikipedia articles relevant to its field. Accordingly, as students learn about the technical and social aspects of Wikipiedia, they are encouraged to improve such articles as open educational resources, open content, MOOC, and free license. Students successfully completing the course earn the WikiSOO Burba Badge, which is based on English Wikipedia’s “service awards” and Peer to Peer University’s badges. The course is offered through the Peer to Peer University’s recently launched School of Open.
“This course has allowed us to bring together several communities that are passionate about the same things, but not always closely connected,” Forsyth said. “The OER community brings the values and practices that brought Wikipedia into existence to formal and informal learning around the world. The School of Open provides the perfect environment for a course like ours, allowing us to work alongside colleagues from free culture organizations like Creative Commons and Mozilla.”
Students are welcome to enroll regardless of their background; while some familiarity with wikis or OER can be helpful, it is not required.
“The WikiSOO course is exactly the kind of work serious Wikipedians need to be doing not only to make their encyclopedia better, but to make their community a more sane place to collaborate,” said Christine, a student who earned the WikiSOO Burba Badge in the course’s first run. “This course provides a solid primer of the skills needed to navigate the syntax, discourse, and guidelines you will encounter if you want to make substantive contributions to Wikipedia’s audacious mission.”
Enrollment in the course’s second run is open through next week. (The first class will be held Tuesday/Wednesday.) See the course’s page on the School of Open for more information, or to join the 60 students who have already enrolled!
LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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Dear Sir/Madam,
I would like to join the course. Look forward to that.
Regards,
Partha

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Please enroll me on the course. I have some limited experience in Wikipedia edits. It can be daunting, but I hope to be able to contribute more.
John Booth

Welcome, John! Please enroll at the link above ( https://p2pu.org/en/courses/49/writing-wikipedia-articles-the-basics-and-beyond/ ). You will need to create an account on the Peer to Peer University site and enroll in both places. (For now, just enrolling at P2PU is enough.) See you in class tomorrow!

Welcome, John and Partha! John: please enroll at the link above ( https://p2pu.org/en/courses/49/writing-wikipedia-articles-the-basics-and-beyond/ ). You will need to create an account on the Peer to Peer University site and enroll in both places. (For now, just enrolling at P2PU is enough.) See you in class tomorrow!

I just saw the info for this course on the gendergap list. What a wonderful program! I would like to join please. I have limited experience and can use some skills. Will sign up now with the links given above. thank you!

Hello–
I’m fairly new to wiki editing, and would like to join the course. I see I’ve missed the start date. Are you going to offer this course again, or is it a self paced course that I may still join at this time?
Thanks!
Erika

Sylvia and Erika, sorry to miss your notes! You may still enroll if you like, you will just need to take a little time to catch up! Please see our main class page here: http://j.mp/wiki-class If you click on the links to Week 1 and Week 2 (which are both complete), you will see what we covered in each class; you will also find links to archived versions of the live classes (one hour each) and lab sessions (also one hour). We do expect to offer the class again, starting in late July; the timing for that version of the… Read more »