Sister projects

What I think most people don't really appreciate is that, although they know about Wikipedia, there's a whole ecosystem of other Wikimedia Foundation sister projects, and I don't think they get enough credit. You've got projects like Wikibooks where you can go put up a recipe and write a cookbook, for example, or write a textbook; in other words, share any knowledge in an online book format.

Then there's other projects like Wikispecies, for taxonomic information of flora and fauna. You've got Wiktionary, which is a free and open dictionary. I put a new word in there yesterday (gloatrage) and now people will go through and work out the etymology and and that sort of thing.

Wikinews allows people to create free and open source news. That would be perfect for, say, journalism students to practice in. And of course images, audio, video etc. can be stored centrally on commons:Wikimedia Commons, so that would be a great place for graphic design students, art students etc. to create diagrams, graphs, images, etc.

So, when we're talking about using wikis in education, I think we need to broaden our perspective a little bit and not be overly Wikipedia-centric.

Wikiversity

Wikiversity evolved out of Wikibooks because people wanted to start putting up lesson plans, have students put up their essays, as well wanting to share original research, which is not allowed on Wikipedia.

So, Wikiversity branched off from Wikibooks and it's now there as a dedicated resource for any teaching and learning related materials, projects, and research (hopefully we're going to hear about Wikijournals later on; they've got a proposal to become their own sister project).

Wikiversity also covers formal and informal learning, learning at any level, from early childhood through to postgraduate education.

Wikiversity can be edited by anybody, but is particularly suited for teachers, students, and researchers.

Tour

Let's have a little look at what you can find on Wikiversity.

You can go to wikiversity dot org – that will remind you that this is like all the sister other projects – it is a multilingual project. And enter into the English Wikiversity.

You'll find guided tours, portals into the different disciplines, social sciences, information technology etc. There are a bunch of featured projects there. These could be anything from a single lesson plan through to a full semester long course. You can Wikiversity:Browse. I also encourage you to try the random button – it is one of favourite buttons on a wiki because you really don't know what is there until you start hitting the random button and seeing what what pops up.

Wikiversity doesn't attract as much editing as Wikipedia, so you're going to get some relatively immature content, which is really just an invitation to improve it, and you'll find some much more mature courses.

So, teachers can jump in there and put up their class materials, develop others' work, or fork and create adapted lesson plans and materials of any scope or size.

Pretty much the first project I put onto Wikiversity, just to work out how to use it was a very simple page about crocodiles for children. But you'll find it goes right through to pretty complex science-based, philosophy-based etc. learning materials.

The thing that really excites me though is that you can get students involved. Particularly in tertiary level education, students can not only read and view information but start to edit. I have 150 students in a semester all creating their own individual topics around motivation and emotion psychology topics. We've built over 1,000 chapters in the last 10 years.

There's also activities like wikidebates, where you can put up arguments and their pros and cons. Various extensions have been enabled in Wikiversity, so you can have interactive quizzes – they are formative, so the marks aren't recorded, but you can drop them into learning materials as you go, so that readers can check their knowledge.

Some similar projects also appear on Wikibooks. There's another University of Canberra Faculty of Health staff member (User:Benrattray) who has students write summaries and critiques of research articles and critiques on Wikibooks (Exercise as it relates to Disease).

Student editing

In my experience, it's relatively straightforward to take a complete novice, somebody who can read and write as a university student, and turn them into an active editor (at least during the teaching period). In a one hour class they'll learn things like creating a user account and practice editing on their user page and building a user profile that links to their other social networks. Then I teach them basic markup, which is now even easier because the visual editor is the default. I also teach them how to do internal links to other Wikiversity pages, how to create interwiki links to Wikipedia pages, and and how to add external links. Then I show them how to create a series of headings and subheadings so that they get a table of contents.

So, students walk out of that first class knowing that not only do they have a user account, but that's a global user account that they can have for a lifetime and they can edit on any of the Wikimedia Foundation sister project pages.

I find that Wikiversity is a pretty gentle place for them to start because it's relatively quiet. They don't get harassed when they put up their edits – their contributions are generally accepted – whereas it can be a bit confronting for a novice to jump into editing an existing Wikipedia page and make mistakes.

In that first class we also look at how to find images on Wikimedia Commons and how to embed them on Wikiversity pages. Later on, many of them want to go and make their own images and they work out how to upload them as well.

Support staff

On English Wikiversity we've got a relatively small set of support staff. Of course any user, whether they've got an account or not, can edit things, move pages, etc. For a teacher who wants to get seriously involved in adding content, they can become a curator, which gives them the ability to delete pages that might have made by mistake and protect pages to prevent students, for example, from editing. What's known on Wikipedia as a sysop or admin, on Wikiversity we call those people custodians. And really they just have the additional ability to block users if necessary. And then there are bureaucrats who can give other people user permissions. Then you get into the more advanced things like if there's a problematic user creating many accounts, they can check what IP address it is coming from. For bigger issues we refer off to Meta-wiki where you've got stewards who can do more strong actions in terms of blocking or blacklisting things. And then, from time to time, we'll ask for extra extensions to be enabled, like say the quiz extension, so that we can use other features that are being developed.

Teacher motivations

Now, I just wanted to say a little bit about the challenges of being committed to an open approach and dealing with the institutional requirements of having materials within a closed world learning management system (LMS) – many of us will be using, say in high schools, Google Classroom, and in universities, Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard etc.

My view is that you want to try and avoid putting teaching content into a learning management system. If you're committed to an open approach, then these open educational resources should be out on the open web somewhere and you restrict your use of a learning management system to the absolute minimum that's necessary from an institutional compliance point of view.

So, for me this comes back to the motivations of the teacher and asking yourself, who is your teaching actually for? If you have some knowledge, you might choose to keep it to yourself, so you're not even a teacher. You keep a diary and you keep things on your own computer and they never see the light of day.

Most educators are probably in the second category, where they will present it to a class in a small room of students. And the material doesn't go any further than that, even though it may have greater potential. Sometimes you might share it more broadly, perhaps with your discipline, perhaps within your institution. So, at least you’re starting to share beyond the classroom. Other people can benefit from those ideas. We might share our learning management system sites with some of our colleagues, but it's still very locked down and it's certainly not accessible to the wider world. Occasionally, you might go off to a professional conference and share what you've done with some of your broader colleagues, or publish in a professional journal behind a paywall. But for me, I'm not really satisfied as a teacher if the value of what I have to share is not maximally shared with everyone and anyone in the world. And not just shared, but with the ability to edit and improve because it’s very unlikely that one person can get everything right. So, by sharing educational materials in an editable, open way, then I go to bed and sleep the best knowing that I've made the information available to as many people as possible.

Learning management systems

When it comes to integration between an LMS and something like Wikiversity, I would keep my learning management system for the institutional enrollments so that students can get credit towards a degree. Students can submit their assessment into the LMS, but in my case this would just be a URL, a web web address, which links to their open work. And their marks are treated as private, so they stay within the LMS. And if there's time- and course-specific announcements, then they would be within the LMS.

But anything that's generic, which is basically all lectures or tutorials or workshops, and preferably the textbook that you might be using, to me, that belongs out on the open web, particularly if you're working in a publicly funded institution. You can make a different argument, perhaps, it's a private education institution.

But most of us in academia are paid by taxpayer dollars, and they deserve, in my view, access to the knowledge and information. So, lesson plans, class materials, descriptions of the assessment items and, as I've mentioned, student work to the extent that it has value to others. I would take the student editing approach more in smaller, more advanced classes, rather than introductory classes. I treat this as a capstone project. They've done all their high school training and their first year university training, so they're ready to become professionals who can broker knowledge out into the world and this is a chance for them to practice that. The pieces that they create can be added to their ePortfolios, their profiles, their CVs. I've had several students contact me to say that piece I wrote helped me to get a job because the employer could see what I could do. I also have them create 3 minute multimedia overviews of what they've done, so that helps to showcase their ability to communicate this information.

Student contributions

The other fun thing that we can do is teach students how to look at, comment, and improve each other’s work. So, instead of just writing an essay that they submit and nobody else ever sees it, they've now got 100 other students being able to look at what they've done and give them feedback along the way. I build in an incentive for, not just working on your own work, but making what we call social contributions, where they log on their user page the edits that they've made to other students’ work.

At the end, for those who get deeply into it, there's bonus marks for those who are most engaged. Most students will make at least some contributions outside of their own topic, which is great for the other students. And of course, we learn from our peers as well.

I have had some feedback from students saying that it's a bit confusing to navigate between my learning management system and all the materials out on the open web. So, I've been playing with embedding Wikiversity pages in an iFrame within the Canvas learning management system. The next thing I want to learn is how to use the Wikiversity API because I don't really want all of the navigational bars at the top and down the side. I really just want to be able to pull out and and display the page content. So, if there's anyone out there who can help me work out how to just grab the the styled page content, I'd love to hear from you.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion, in my view and experience, Wikiversity and the sister projects provide a perfect platform for open educational resource development and a perfect experiential playground for teachers to invite their students to learn about editing, creating, collaborating etc.

Q&A

While you're coming up with your questions, I'm happy to bring up Wikiversity and we'll have a have a little look at it.

Q: Any idea how many students go on to become editors on Wikiversity?

A: Look, I don't know, and, to be honest, I would think it's pretty low. I show students, and I encourage students to link keywords to Wikipedia. So, they become familiar with using that content, and of course they use it all the time. Once they get that interwiki linking part worked out, they realise how the projects are connected, but I think they still lack confidence because most of the Wikipedia pages they go to are pretty mature. The thing they do mostly, besides just working on Wikiversity, would be adding content to Wikimedia Commons because a lot of them go looking for images to illustrate the concepts they are writing about and they often come up a bit empty handed. Part of that is that the Wikimedia Commons search is not that great, so I teach them how to use Google Image search to search Wiki Commons.

Here we go. So, this is the library of Motivation and Emotion book chapters that students have written over the last 10 years and if we search the book chapters say for “happiness” you can see we've got quite a few different happiness-related chapters.

In addition, we could go back to see the past featured chapters. When I first did this exercise, I didn't set up a word count limit, and I was shocked because students were writing 10,000 words, 12,000 words, which was a real burden to read, so they’re now capped at 4000 words which sounds like a lot, but I just word count the whole page, so it includes your references and everything else.

We use a similar page structure approach to Wikipedia, but they they get rewarded for including things like case studies and interactive elements like quizzes. So, the idea is that these chapters are a bit like a self-help book. They're based on psychological science, but you could come here and find an answer to this question about, what's the relationship between anticipatory regret and motivation?. All the subtitles are questions, so that's basically their essay question. I thought, when we started, that we would just run out of topics but it's not hard to find new topics, funnily enough, because knowledge just keeps expanding.

Q: What about students who might be nervous of editing because of being judged by their peers or coming from cultures who are not so comfortable with their work being open?

A: Great question and and it's one of the FAQ in the initial phases. I do spend a bit of time in the first couple of lectures where we see a couple of videos explaining what a wiki is. You might not be able to see, but I'm wearing my Hawaiian shirt today, and that's because it is where wiki as word comes from. Wiki-wiki is the Hawaiian word for quick, so this is the quickest and simplest method of having an openly editable web page. I use the metaphor of learning how to ride a bike, because if I put a bike in front of you and you didn't know how to ride a bike, you think it's impossible. How can you balance on two wheels? So, when students first see a wiki, they go, that's impossible. How can I put that my work up there? Somebody else might come along and change it, they might delete it, they might make a mess of it. So, there's a lot of negative perceptions because they've been trained in a very closed system. So, that's why we start doing small edits. They play with their user page and we just gradually build up. I now have them submit a plan for their wiki chapter early on, so that's where they just put in headings and dot points and that way I can look at it and give them some feedback about the structure.

And that helps to build their confidence that they're on the right track and really it's a matter of them just trying it out and learning to trust the system. We go through privacy issues when creating user accounts. You can be your real name if you want to or you can be completely anonymous if you want to. Some of them start off with a pseudonym and then learn to trust the system and go, I'm now proud of that, and then we get their username changed so that they now be identified as having contributed to that chapter. I think out of 1000 students in 10 years I've had maybe one or two students who at the end of semester have said I really don't like what's happened. I don't like the fact that my work is out there and and they can put in a deletion request, but at the end of the day it has been explained that you're clicking the button to say I release this under Creative Commons.

It's in the unit outline that if you don't think this assignment is going to work for you, negotiate with your lecturer to come up with a different approach. I had a blind student a few years ago and we just agreed for him to a Google doc because it was just a bit too much to expect him to work out the technical aspects.

Q: So, I think that's really goes to the heart of some of the issues and I wanted to ask one last question building on that question and your answer about how people are trained. If we think about that at the institutional level, what interactions and feedback have you had from the university when you talk to people about using this approach?

A: It's a hard conversation to have. This audience is by far the easiest to have the conversation with. There's a lot of ego, I think, in academia and people feel very attached to their teaching, which is not even their teaching, it's the university’s teaching because they paid you to provide it. I’ve found it really hard to facilitate change. A few people have picked up some of the ideas. Every now and again I go and look at the institutional copyright policy, but my read of the policy says that teachers also own their teaching, so therefore can choose to use an open platform. I haven't run into any problems. I've been waiting, even kind of expecting that somebody might get grumpy and come and knock on the door and say you can't do that. I think in research we've progressed further. Publishing openly is becoming increasingly common and even expected. Now, depending on your grant source, you must publish openly, but teaching is lagging well behind. I don't really understand why. If you look at the mission statement of the university and the vision statement etc., it's all consistent with a university as a place for the community to participate in knowledge. Yes, you have some enrolled students, but it's not exclusive to the enrolled students.

Q: The University of Sydney owns its teaching maternal.

A: Yeah, and it does vary. If I was at Uni of Sydney, I'd be probably agitating to see whether you can’t get at least dual ownership. Because you own your research – why not your teaching?