We want to challenge the traditional definition of education. In the Wikimedia User Group Greece community, we believe that learning is achieved by editing. The goal of this campaign is to engage educators in using Wikimedia Projects in their classes. To this end, we have created a lesson plan, for them to understand basic things, pick what works best for their own classrooms and test with their students. We gave them a chance to get to know more about the Wikimedia.
We want to train as much educators as possible. We take in consideration their own interest and their own availability when we plan the training program. Not everyone can follow in the same pace. Not everyone lives in an area with a local wikipedian around. We also consider our own resources. We are volunteers and we have to create something that can work even when we are not available ourselves.
Our training program for educators was created as a
MOOC that could be run on a simple website, that could be customized easily and we could use all the features we needed. WordPress and the LearnPress plugin was a good choice.
The course was divided in 10 weekly modules. Every module contained a video from the series for wikipedia in education prepared by the WMF (subtitled by ourselves), video tutorials on how to edit, help texts on how to edit, editing tasks for the trainees, texts on using wikipedia in education, and a weekly YouTube Live meeting with the trainees. The trainees did not have to complete everything to move to the next module. They could follow on their own pace.
Sixty of the educators completed the course. 80% of them spent 1-3 hours per week, and 20% spent 4-5 hours per week reading, watching the videos and editing. We have found that the most useful resource for them were the editing video tutorials, followed by the Wikimedia in Education videos, while the help texts and other material were less useful. That proved that when we aimed to create a course where people should learn through small chunks of information where that can spend little time, was right. We will continue our training program with small videos for the educators and their students.
Contributors to the project: Marios Magioladitis Konstantinos Stampoulis (Geraki) Adamantios Dritsas (DADRITS) Konstantinos Skiadopoulos (KSkiadopoulos) Angelos Giannelos.
