Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/August 2016

Conversational English as a Second/Foreign Language MOOC
Hi! I have decided for the third sequence of my MOOC on conversational American English I would use Wikiversity as the platform. I am excited to see how this experiment goes! Feel free to take and look and share any feedback!!

The course is named ENG 099.

--Charles Jeffrey Danoff (discuss • contribs) 04:50, 3 August 2016 (UTC)


 * It looks like you're off to a great start! Note that Naming conventions avoid the use of course numbers in titles. It would be best to move the page to American English, or American English I, or similar, and leave ENG 099 as a redirect. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 01:07, 4 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Hi, Dave Braunschweig!! Thanks for the quick feedback! The naming convention makes total sense! Would you mind if I switched it over after the course completes in September? I like having the URL end in eng099 for student distribution. If we did the redirect they would have to click an additional link, right? Please share your thoughts! :) ... Also, do you have any advice for formatting/aligning the course to best fit into other ESL materials here? -- Charles Jeffrey Danoff (discuss • contribs) 04:54, 8 August 2016 (UTC)


 * A move with redirect will automatically redirect users to the new page. You can do it now or wait until September if you wish. ESL isn't my area of expertise, but I have noticed that the ESL materials need a "big picture" redesign so there is some coherence across the many pages. My recommendation would be to think through your own design, and then look at how to merge/include the other materials in your vision rather than try to include your vision with the others. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 02:23, 9 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the advice, Dave Braunschweig! I will consider the design of the ESL materials and how my work can fit therein and/or how it can better be adjusted to reflect my work and others! I think Wikiversity is a logical space for a "center" of ESL materials and links across the web, I appreciate your advice! :) Note, over 100 students registered thus far and 8 sent in their week 1 homework on time. Good start, I believe! I'm happy the course layout here appears to be working. :) -- Charles Jeffrey Danoff (discuss • contribs) 08:21, 17 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Hi, Dave! Following your advice, I changed the resource name to follow Naming conventions. What do you think? -- Charles Jeffrey Danoff (discuss • contribs) 07:01, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Is this the right place? (Regional educational resources)
I am part of a homeschooling community. As families make the choice to homeschool, they have many, many questions, and there are many, many answers. I have been thinking about how to have an always up-to-date, crowd-edited list of answers, including resources like: - local support groups - state or national organizations - local educational cooperatives - charter, online, or correspondence schools

I am envisioning a homeschool portal with subcategories for states, then regions. Obviously, a wiki is the ideal format, but the question is where to host it. Is this type of content appropriate at wikiversity?

--2602:306:CDAB:F640:2C98:EC2C:FA0B:7EFC (discuss) 22:57, 3 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Most of what you are proposing would be welcome here. The only concern I see so far is in the charter, online, or correspondence schools. Those schools typically don't "set learning free", and pages with links like that often become promotional rather than educational. Care would need to be taken to ensure that part of the project has a learning focus. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 01:01, 4 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the quick response. I hope to get this started soon, and your feedback about the schools is helpful. Sixteenkats (discuss • contribs) 06:28, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

This seems quite interesting. I'd be willing to see how this goes. ---Atcovi (Talk - Contribs) 19:28, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Save/Publish
The Editing team is planning to change the name of the “ ” button to “  ” and “  ”. “ ” will be used when you create a new page. “ ” will be used when you change an existing page. The names will be consistent in all editing environments.

This change will probably happen during the week of 30 August 2016. The change will be announced in Tech News when it happens.

If you are fluent in a language other than English, please check the status of translations at translatewiki.net for “ ” and “  ”.

The main reason for this change is to avoid confusion for new editors. Repeated user research studies with new editors have shown that some new editors believed that “ ” would save a private copy of a new page in their accounts, rather than permanently publishing their changes on the web. It is important for this part of the user interface to be clear, since it is difficult to remove public information after it is published. We believe that the confusion caused by the “ ” button increases the workload for experienced editors, who have to clean up the information that people unintentionally disclose, and report it to the functionaries and stewards to suppress it. Clarifying what the button does will reduce this problem.

Beyond that, the goal is to make all the wikis and languages more consistent, and some wikis made this change many years ago. The Legal team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports this change. Making the edit interface easier to understand will make it easier to handle licensing and privacy questions that may arise.

Any help pages or other basic documentation about how to edit pages will also need to be updated, on-wiki and elsewhere. On wiki pages, you can use the wikitext codes  and   to display the new labels in the user's preferred language. For the language settings in your account preferences, these wikitext codes produce “ ” and “  ”.

Please share this news with community members who teach new editors and with others who may be interested. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:03, 9 August 2016 (UTC)


 * I really like this, it's good to know that this will be implemented. Cheers! ---Atcovi (Talk - Contribs) 20:28, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

Who uses Wikiversity?
Any research? In a thread above, I mentioned another people-powered online research community. I reached out to collaborate and the person who responded asked a very germane question which I hadn't yet: who uses Wikiversity data? To put a finer point on it, I specifically referred her to the Bloom clock project and she asked if anyone has used this for any purpose. Does anyone know? Do we have data on who uses this site and how? —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:50, 21 August 2016 (UTC)


 * No idea. (Sorry, that's not much help is it?) I've always been fascinated by Wikiversity, but never really used it for very much. The first serious thing I've seen happen here for a while (and it could just be because I'm not looking hard enough, so apologies to the cool projects I've ignored) is the Wikiversity Journal of Medicine. That seems like a pretty great endevour. One thing that I think could help get more usage here is to encourage learning blogs in userspace here. &mdash; Sam Wilson ( Talk &bull; Contribs ) &hellip; 00:29, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Classmates of mine use Wikiversity. I've always loved the idea of having notes on the web, without having stacks of paper that can easily be gone (I'm not good with keep track of stuff, heh). ---Atcovi (Talk - Contribs) 16:07, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Linking to youtube videos in a course?
Hi, I would like to start a pre-school curriculum. However, I would really like to link youtube videos as part of the curriculum. I realise that the vast majority of these videos are not free/open licensed. Unfortunately there are almost no free and open source videos/songs for children. I haven't even been able to find a freely licensed version of the alphabet song!

I searched through the archives and found this discussion about it from 2007: Colloquium/archives/February_2007

The discussion didn't seem to come to any conclusion and it has been almost a decade so I thought the question was worth asking again (forgive me if I missed any other more recent discussions!)

Mvolz (discuss • contribs) 16:03, 22 August 2016 (UTC)


 * You can link to YouTube videos. Since Wikiversity is only hosting the link, not the content, the licensing issues are diminished. When I post these, I still try to link to videos that are not heavily advertising-supported, and I don't link to any that I know are copyright violations posted by someone other than the original author / publisher. That works in my field. I'm not sure what you'll find for preschool materials. Is it possible to link out to PBS videos and materials as an alternative? (Not sure, as I haven't researched what PBS makes available.) -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 19:07, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Aims and Objectives
I was looking at a page recently and I noticed that the objective was stated in this way:

The aim of this course is to teach the basics of fantastic topic

Without wishing to reduce the issue to jargon, this objective is not learner centered. A lot of educators nowadays would say that an objective would be better stated in this sort of way:

After completing the course, participants will be able to...

The next thing I saw was that another objective was stated as

You will understand important topic

And a lot of educators would be concerned that this objective as stated isn't behavioural and perhaps not easily measurable (I stress, **as stated**). They might prefer

You will be able to explain these things about important topic

And perhaps even set a standard and a condition:

so that a beginner could do X, without any reference books

I am aware that this might be an obsession of trainers/teachers, but I wonder if we could encourage a culture of specifying *learning* rather than teaching objectives and of making objectives behaviourable and at least observable if not measurable?

--Jimbotyson (discuss • contribs) 10:37, 24 August 2016 (UTC)


 * This is certainly a recommended best practice from a course design standpoint. It is consistent with the best resource I know on how to write learning objectives, at http://archive.tlt.psu.edu/learningdesign/objectives/writing.html . But it also may be too restrictive or too proscriptive for new content developers, particularly those who don't have experience in course design. How would you propose making the transition from a teaching perspective to a learner-centered perspective? -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 12:05, 24 August 2016 (UTC)