Teaching to Impact: A Toolkit for Embedding Wikipedia Editing in Asian Studies Curriculum

The Wiki Education Dashboard is a platform for organizing Wikipedia classroom assignments and other learning and editing activities. An instructor can sign up to run a Wikipedia assignment before each term by logging in to create a new course. Once the application is approved, the instructor and students must sign up for a Wikipedia account to gain access to Wikipedia Education consultants and a customizable Wikipedia Course Dashboard. 

The Course Dashboard provides self-paced Wikipedia training modules, exercises and, most importantly, a shared online space for tracking Wikipedia assignments. The instructor should decide early on if the Wiki Education dashboard will be used for the course, or whether the free online training resources are sufficient. 

Pros: Instructor and student support services from Wiki Education staff, ability to track student progress on online assignments, easy peer review process by assigning article drafts that link directly to the user's sandbox.

Cons: Requires logging in and setting up an account for each student, adds another website for students to access in addition to the course management system, contains additional information that students may not need to complete the assignment.

Dr. Chau applied to create a course with Wiki Education and set up the dashboard for her PAAS 302 course. The link to the dashboard was shared on BrightSpace, the course management system, and students were encouraged to sign up for their own accounts to access the dashboard. We noticed that not many students completed most of the modules. The research identified several reasons for this:

• Students' opinions were divided on how much time they needed to invest in Wikipedia editing training. This is related to individuals' technical skills and previous experience with Wikipedia or other online editing.
• Some students had mixed opinions on jumping among the three platforms used in a course: BrightSpace, the Wiki Education Dashboard and the Wikipedia editing sandbox, which led to confusion for some students.

• Two or three weeks before the start of the course, if the Wiki Education Dashboard is part of the course, the instructor needs to apply to set up the Wiki Education Dashboard for the course. The Wiki Education Dashboard can be customized to meet the goals of the course and balance the workload of the students.
• In order to meet the course objectives, the instructor will need to determine how much class time and which in-class exercises will be devoted to Wikipedia training, and what the key content is for students to know after class. Please see the Weekly Plan document (Appendix 2) for details.
• To reduce student workload, the instructor and librarian could work together to decide which Dashboard training content is essential to course objectives and assignments and which is less important. Please see the Weekly Plan document (Appendix 2) for details.
• The course syllabus/ outline is recommended to list the selected Wikipedia Dashboard training content along with other assigned readings.
• It is especially important to decide how to use the Wiki Education Dashboard for peer-review. If students prefer not to sign up for individual accounts, the class could sign up for one class account, or each small group could sign up for a group account, but since Wikipedia accounts are linked to one email address this could potentially require group members to have access to a shared email account. The sandbox for editing and peer-review is linked to each user’s account and the instructor can assign specific articles to each user during the peer-review process.