Wikipedia Education Program/status

Last update on: 2014-06-monthly

2011-12-31
Jeroen De Dauw started to work on a MediaWiki extension to support the Wikipedia Education Program; the implementation of course, term and institution management has been completed, and a test wiki is available.

2012-01-24
Institution and course management is done, and so are student and instructor workflows. Logging has been implemented and work on revision history support has started. Several UI improvements have been made including using a tab interface similar to regular articles and use of WikiEditor for textfields in which wikitext can be entered.

2012-01-30

 * Merged master courses with courses for simplicity.
 * Implemented revision history. One can now see and browse through a list of old revisions and view courses and institutions as they where at one of these.
 * Replaced special pages for courses and institutions by corresponding namespaces for more standard behavior and having discussion tabs.

2012-01-31
Jeroen De Dauw implemented many features, like institution & course management, and instructor & student workflows. He also implemented logging and revision histories.

2012-02-21

 * Added ambassador profiles.
 * Added lists of ambassadors.
 * Created personalized course listing for students, instructors and ambassadors on Special:MyCourses.
 * Added ability for students to disenroll from courses and for instructors to remove students from courses.
 * Added ability for students to list articles they are working on and for people to associate themselves as reviewer for these articles.
 * Imported some existing data to the demo wiki for beta testing.
 * Improved handling of deleted articles.
 * Improved logging.
 * People can now mark changes to courses and institutions as minor edit and provide an edit summary, much like when editing regular articles.

2012-02-29
Jeroen De Dauw implemented a lot of new features, including ambassador profiles, personalized course listing for students, instructors and ambassadors, and article listing for students.

2012-03-31
Jeroen De Dauw completed stuff struck through on the roadmap. Testing and code review will follow when complete.

2012-04-monthly
Jeroen De Dauw has made the project almost feature complete. User testing is now finalized, and the team is still trying to get started getting code review.

2012-05-monthly
<section begin="2012-05-monthly"/>Jeroen De Dauw completed the project. Sam Reed is now reviewing the code.<section end="2012-05-monthly"/>

2012-06-monthly
<section begin="2012-06-monthly"/>Jeroen De Dauw and Sam Reed finished review. Extension has been deployed, but temporarily disabled again due to a namespace/title conflict with a Star Trek: Voyager episode ("Course: Oblivion"!). This should be resolved shortly.<section end="2012-06-monthly"/>

2012-07-monthly
<section begin="2012-07-monthly"/>The extension is still disabled, pending resolution of namespace issues. The Education Program team has been presenting at various conferences around the world.<section end="2012-07-monthly"/>

2012-11-monthly
<section begin="2012-11-monthly"/>No update this month.<section end="2012-11-monthly"/>

2013-10-monthly
<section begin="2013-10-monthly"/>This month, we fixed several bugs in the Education Program extension and added one much-needed UI feature. More improvements are in the pipeline. For now, we're focusing on issues that are not linked to the extension's lack of integration with ContentHandler, and on features that might carry over to a new version of the extension. We've also begun the groundwork for redesigning the UX and broadening the extension's scope.<section end="2013-10-monthly"/>

2013-11-monthly
<section begin="2013-11-monthly"/>This month, we improved a feature that was built in October (allowing instructors to assign articles to student editors), completed a new feature (allowing instructors to add users as students) and started another one (displaying information about student editors' courses on Special:Contributions). We fixed some bugs, and kept up with changes in MediaWiki core. We also continued preliminary work&mdash;started last month&mdash;towards renewing the UX and broadening the extension's scope.<section end="2013-11-monthly"/>

2013-12-monthly
<section begin="2013-12-monthly"/>In December, we improved and fixed issues with the current Education Program extension, and continued preliminary work towards a new version of the software. We added a message on Special:Contributions about users' participation in courses, fixed a bug involving course undeletion and tweaked related styling, addressed a breaking change in core, improved i18n (in collaboration with Language Engineering) and began work on notifications for course-related events. We also fleshed out more ideas about the new version and possible synergies with other existing and proposed functionality, and reached out to other teams for input on this.<section end="2013-12-monthly"/>

2014-01-monthly
<section begin="2014-01-monthly"/>This month, once again we divided our time between the existing Education Program extension and work towards a new version of the software. We thoroughly analyzed database transactions in the current extension and fixed a slew of long-standing database-related bugs. Also on the current extension, we finished adding a notification type and notifications infrastructure, and worked on an improved course editing UX. For the new version, we studied workflow systems and considered how software for the Education Program and other outreach activities might use such a system. Adam Wight started on prototype workflow code. He also went through our code review backlog, bringing a multitude of new features and improvements to production.<section end="2014-01-monthly"/>

2014-02-monthly
<section begin="2014-02-monthly"/>For the first half of the month, we focused on the current Education Program extension. We fixed many old and new bugs—including a few remaining database-related problems—and improved the UI for editing courses. Also, two Facebook Open Academy students started work on new notifications for the extension. In mid-February the team shifted our focus to creating new software for many kinds of collaborative editing, including, but not limited to, Education Program courses. The first phase of this work, called editor campaigns, is being carried out with the Growth team.<section end="2014-02-monthly"/>

2014-03-monthly
<section begin="2014-03-monthly"/>This month, thanks to the work of Facebook Open Academy student JJ Liu, we added a new type of notification for course pages: users are now notified whenever they get added to a course. We also fixed inconsistencies with interface messages, user rights, and the deletion of institutions from the system.<section end="2014-03-monthly"/>

2014-04-monthly
<section begin="2014-04-monthly"/>This month we deployed several bug fixes, including disabling the malfunctioning and little-used student profiles feature and setting a sensible default end date for new courses. Thanks to volunteer Tony Thomas, the extension-related preferences were moved into the Appearance tab of Preferences.

Progress toward several other improvements was made in April: Sage Ross began implementing an API to generate lists of enrolled student editors from one or more courses, and the Facebook Open Academy students continued their work on new notification features, and also embarked on need-finding research for an improved course activity feed.<section end="2014-04-monthly"/>

2014-05-monthly
<section begin="2014-05-monthly"/>This month we fixed bugs and made some improvements to the Education Program extension. The biggest change was Sage Ross's addition of an API for listing students enrolled in courses. Also, students from Facebook Open Academy worked on a new notification and a new activity feed.<section end="2014-05-monthly"/>

2014-06-monthly
<section begin="2014-06-monthly"/>This month, the Education Program extension again received incremental improvements and bugfixes. Sage Ross of the Wiki Education Foundation submitted two patches: one that adds information to the API for listing students, and another that lets anonymous users compare course versions. Also, a student from Facebook Open Academy fixed a usability issue in the article assignment feature.<section end="2014-06-monthly"/>