Wikiversity:School and university projects

If you are a professor or teacher at a school or university, we encourage you to use Wikiversity and/or Wikipedia in your class, whether it's preschool, primary, secondary, tertiary, or non-formal.


 * List of projects
 * Outreach materials and introductions for educators

Overview
This page provides suggestions to guide teachers who want to have their students use Wikiversity in conventional brick and mortar classroom-type settings. Wikiversity participation can:
 * advance participant's knowledge;
 * create useful content and learning activities that can be shared around the world.

It is important to consider what your students will contribute here. Wikiversity is an experiment on how to make use of wiki technology to support education. If your project fits within that broad mission then you are welcome to make use of Wikiversity resources for your class.

If you feel you could utilize Wikiversity to facilitate your teaching and your students' learning, please feel free. There are a myriad of ways you can go about doing this, and quite a few ways this has already been done.

Learning management system
One way to utilize Wikiversity in a similar fashion to learning management systems (such as Moodle). Thus, you can use Wikiversity as a portal for your students' learning. For example, you can:
 * create a page for your course
 * post syllabi, assignments, syllabi, quizzes, study guides, readings (presuming they are GFDL compatable), reading lists, links, discussions, and so forth.

Learning by doing
Wikiversity has adopted a "learn by doing" model of education. When your students become editors of Wikiversity webpages they learn by collaborating on course-related projects and their effort will contribute online to a global effort to make all of human knowledge freely available.

Project collaboration
Wikiversity can also be used as a place to collaborate on projects. You and your students can write papers, conduct research, and discuss the subjects being studied and how best to study them.

Personal learning environment
You and your students can create accounts using their real name or a psuedonym and then utilize Wikiversity as their own personal learning environment whilst participating in the course.

Getting started
Wikiversity can be difficult for a newcomer to fathom. The welcome page provides an overview to help participants get started quickly. Most Wikiversity participants will also be helpful in guiding newcomers and explaining how we do things. However, for the sake of your class we strongly suggest that you yourself contribute here and become familiar with Wikiversity before sending your students. Your students will be much less likely to encounter problems here if you can give them appropriate guidance.

Welcoming committee
If you have any questions or need advice - click here to leave a message and someone from wikiversity will contact you and help you get started. Feel free to contact anyone from the welcoming committee (by clicking on talk next to the name) and type a message describing the project that you would like to start here:


 * mikeu (talk) - physical science, astronomy, history of science
 * JWSchmidt (talk) - science, Web 2.0, learning, fiction
 * Erkan Yilmaz (talk), general
 * James Neill (talk), Social sciences
 * , general

Scope
Introduction to Wikiversity covers basic concepts used for hosting education-oriented learning projects. Also see Wikiversity's mission. We work closely with sister projects. If your class activities involve content useful to encyclopedia style articles please see Wikipedia. If your project involves development of content potentially useful in a textbook, you may wish to review Wikibooks. Materials developed here during learning activties are easily ported as appropriate to other Wikimedia Foundation projects. Please have your students do real wiki editing that contributes to the Wikiversity mission of promoting learning. Please do not invent irrelevant or off-topic editing tasks that disrupt Wikiversity.

Practice editing
Practice editing before giving a wiki editing assignment to your students. Register a Wikiversity user account for yourself and spend some time editing. Perhaps you can help develop this survey: Wikimedia experience.

Search
Search for existing activities to determine if there are existing Wikiversity activities applicable to your needs. (see Browse) and use the search box on the top or sidebar. Start a Wikiversity webpage for your planned project and link to it appropriately from applicable portal pages.

Introductions
When you want to start such a project, please briefly describe what you are doing on this page under the "Current projects" heading and please leave a note at the Colloquium page. Please activate your user account's email and leave some contact information on your user page.

Help
Please make use of resources such as the help pages and use the Sandbox for any test or practice edits. If you need help, feel free to ask questions at the Colloquium.

Account names
Please do not create numerical accounts with university or school account numbers. While this may be initially convenient, it is better to use a real name or a pseudonym.

Copyrights
Please keep Copyrights in mind. Not everything on the Web is free for the taking, and even that which is may not be compatible with our licensing. This is true for text, sound files and images (see Uploading files). If your students will be working at Wikiversity by starting from your own course notes and other materials, be sure that you make it clear if it is acceptable to add your personal materials or your school's materials to Wikiversity webpages. Furthermore, check who owns your students' course work. If the owner is your institution, check that you have permission to contribute it under the GFDL license.

Course protection
Note that a course protection policy exists at Wikiversity in order to make sure that course materials can exist in stable state in accordance with your preferences, and so that people who are not running the course cannot disrupt the course. If you want to protect some Wikiversity pages from editing by participants outside of your course, add Template:Protected course to the pages.

Summary report
Once you have finished a project, we would very much appreciate reading a description of the results. This could be on a separate page if it is long, or on this page in the "Past projects" heading.

Original research
Wikiversity is creating guidelines that will allow participants to publish new ideas, discoveries or articles. See our relevant policies, Verifiability, Disclosures, Scholarly ethics, Original research.

Templates
We have a template that can be easily copied and adopted to create a wiki-syllabus for your course-related project on Wikiversity. See: class project boilerplate.

Student orientation
It is important to help 'orient' your students to Wikiversity. Here are some suggested resources:
 * Orientation
 * Help:The original tour for newcomers
 * What is Wikiversity?

Projects
Dozens of courses that are run in schools and universities develop material on Wikiversity, publish their course materials and student research here, or have class collaborations with other Wikiversity users as some of their assignments.

Transcluded from /List of projects/:

Wikibooks

 * Wikibooks:Guidelines for class projects

Wikipedia

 * Classroom assignments on the rise - Wikipedia Signpost (2006)
 * Educational content on Wikipedia - Wikipedia Signpost (2008)
 * Wikipedia:School and university projects
 * Wikipedia:WikiProject Classroom coordination

Wikiversity

 * Brick and mortar collaboration
 * Course outlines
 * Educational wikis
 * Help:101 things to do with your class on Wikiversity
 * Introduction to Wikiversity scholarship
 * Real world schools
 * Syllabus boilerplate - can be used when you start a Wikiversity project page for your course.
 * Wikiversity teachers