Education strategy (draft 2012)

Wikimedia UK education projects

Annual Conference — Campus Ambassadors – Student Societies — Schools — Committee — VLE

This is a draft strategy document, not yet approved or formally adopted. Suggestions for improvement are very welcome.

Summary

1. There are immense and proven benefits to educators and the Wikimedia projects from working together.
2. To articulate these benefits, we need to explain the Wikimedia projects as distinctive processes and practice rather than just as resources.
3. In the long term, education outreach should be at least as high a priority in Wikimedia UK’s activity as its cultural partnerships with the GLAM sector.
4. We need to avoid fragmented efforts that do not achieve anything big and lasting, while also encouraging bold steps and innovation. So we need to structure our activity around a main goal, while also supporting other activity led by our volunteers.
5. In the short and medium term we should concentrate on Higher Education, which is culturally closest to the Wikimedia community. In the long term, we also need to be active in other sectors such as secondary education and adult education.
6. Within the HE sector, the main priority should be to learn from the successes and past problems of the Wikipedia Education Program and adapt it to the UK HE context, and to promote and support it in a growing number of courses. We should also explore and promote the educational potential of Wikiversity, Wikibooks and other Wikimedia projects.
7. The Higher Education sector has enormous diversity between and within institutions. Scottish degrees differ from those in England & Wales, medical degrees differ structurally from other subjects, and so on. There are varying institutional cultures, academic disciplines and pedagogical approaches. This fact should inform all our outreach work.
8. The Open Education movement is also diverse and rapidly changing, with institutional and national projects around the world as well as online communities such as Wikieducator and P2PU. We should keep aware of this global context and establish “embassies” in relevant communities to promote our work and invite input.
9. The next priority for Wikimedia UK staff recruitment, once the central office roles of communications, events and fundraising are sorted out, should be dedicated education staff. Communications and events staff should dedicate some of their time to supporting our work in education.
10. Our use of staff time should reflect the diversity of ways we can work with learners and educators. We should be regularly approaching individual academics, librarians, support staff, managers, and sector bodies, gradually learning which approaches are most effective.

(To be read in conjunction with the Education section of the Draft 2012 Five Year Plan)

The potential benefits

In the Wikipedia community, we are collaborating - often with people from different time zones and cultures - to produce, review and improve an original, high-quality work which digests the state of published knowledge across the widest variety of topics. Doing this, we have to critically engage with deep questions about the nature of knowledge, bias and neutrality, and apply the results in specific cases. Wikipedia also has its own learning curve in terms of collaboration skills, IT skills and style guidelines that contributors learn. What we learn, we share, either through group discussion, mentorship relations, or crystallising our experience into a text, video or interactive tutorial.

Many elements of the above sound like a university education, or what learners ideally hope to get from that experience. The polymath Martin Gardner said the best way to learn about a topic is to write a book about it. On-wiki educational assignments take this literally: learners experience critical review and publication, including the pride of having written for a huge readership.

As well as these opportunities for learners and teachers, educational assignments offer a way to improve Wikipedia and its sister projects, particularly in academic topics that have proved difficult. The UK has a top-class Higher Education system, in some ways the best in the world. Within this system, students are producing high-quality work which is likely to be seen by no-one outside the course. In on-wiki assignments, the public benefit directly from the work of learners and indirectly from the expertise of tutors and institutions’ library and support services.

So the Wikimedia community and UK education institutions have many common goals, especially now that institutions are increasingly recognising the value of open education. Yet they are still largely independent of each other. Each can be argued to be doing seriously on a large scale what the other is merely dabbling in: in Wikimedia, we are delivering free educational and reference materials to an audience of hundreds of millions, while the traditional institutions are delivering formal, accredited education on a massive scale.

As the UK’s national charity promoting, supporting and improving the Wikimedia projects, and with a membership including many current and former educators. Wikimedia UK is ideally placed to help these two groups work together. It is already building relationships with some of the most forward-thinking institutions and individuals.

Wikimedia UK already works successfully with the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector. This activity opens up content (documents, images, video and artefacts) to the Wikimedia community, complementing education outreach and training, which bring additional labour. The Wikimedia UK budget allocates much less to education than partnerships with GLAMs. This does not reflect a lower priority for educational projects, but the belief that impressive things can be achieved in education for relatively little cost. In the coming years it needs to rapidly scale up and professionalise its education activity and address the education sector in a more systematic way.

Resources and Practice

As Wikimedia contributors, we think of wikis as both a resource and a process. Wikipedia, for example, can be thought of as a collection of millions of articles or as a community with established practices to improve the content. Wikimedia projects are charitable in two senses: they give the world a free encyclopedia, a free dictionary and so on, but they also give the world the edit button; the chance to participate in meaningful and rewarding collaboration. From the resources, we can learn the key life events of a historical figure, the source of a quotation or the meaning of an unfamiliar word. From engaging with the community and its practices, we learn about collaboration, about bias, about fact-checking, and about taking and giving criticism.

The deep educational value from wikis comes from understanding the process, ideally by taking part in it. Poor quality articles - whether incomplete, inaccurate, or badly written - present the best educational opportunity, because students can get involved in critiquing and improving them.

This distinction is a source of misunderstanding when academics and other experts look at Wikipedia and its sister projects. Asked to evaluate these projects, someone may well treat them as static resources, while not really seeing the process behind them, or evaluating its potential.

The education sector is dealing with the same distinction between resources and processes. The last decade has seen a push from funders and individual advocates to open up educational resources, making them accessible and remixable with appropriate formats, licences and data. The JISC/HE Academy-funded UKOER programme is now in its third phase, and has put millions of pounds into a wide variety of OER projects, across many subjects, institutions and technology platforms. There is an appreciation that merely putting the content out there is not enough, and that to really get the benefits, education has to adopt more senses of openness. The term Open Educational Practices (OEP) has been coined to cover the context and use of OERs; the practices teaching staff, learners, institutions, and policymakers need to get right if they want to reap the benefits of open education. In this respect, the Wikimedia community has a large head-start. This is what we should emphasise when we talk about our role in education.

The Wikipedia Education Progam

(to come)

Staffing and management

Part of the reason the Wikipedia Education Program has so much participation is that the Wikimedia Foundation have a dedicated and talented team of staff backing the project. Wikimedia Deutschland also have two education staff at the time of writing. It is very important for Wikimedia UK to recruit education staff, as a way to make sure that relationships with institutions are long-term, and individual contacts and volunteer activities have a cumulative effect.

With hundreds of universities, each of which has dozens of departments or units, each of which can have many potential contacts, there is a large amount of information that needs careful management so that staff and volunteers build on each other’s work and give a professional impression.

Since the education sector is so diverse and tribal, multiple part-time posts, dispersed across the country and across areas of subject expertise, are preferable to a small number of full-time employees. These staff need to come from inside the education sector in some sense, either because the person has past experience in teaching (or teaching support) or because they are combining the Wikimedia part-time role with a university role.

The growth of the education team assumes an expansion of the overall Wikimedia UK budget in coming years. This requires the whole community to help in the form of ever more effective fundraising and for the Board and Chief Executive to make funding education staff a long-term priority. There should be a trustee, or other trusted volunteer with relevant experience, taking a strategic lead on education, liaising with staff and volunteers and reporting regularly to the Board.