Talk:Wikipedia Education Program

Interested in participating/advising.
Hello fellow Mediawiki-ers,

First I'd like to say I think this is a great idea. My past job was working on EcoliWiki and GONUTS in the Biochemistry/Biophysics department at Texas A&M University. We used the wikis a lot as academic hubs as well as educational resources. I spent a number of years working directly on tools and extensions for MW in an academic setting, and have a fair bit of experience with this. I'd love to help out with the development however I can, although I'm quite busy with my fulltime job. I'd also love to advise on this project if the need arises. Feel free to contact me with any questions.

--DanielRenfro (talk) 21:23, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

Course Pages
The main issue I have with the course page is that even as an experienced user of MediaWiki wikis, I find editing the course page, after creation, too complex and sometimes impossible. Some of the auto-generated portions seem to become forever-fixed and I can't figure out how to change them. The teacher/student status also means that there are portions of the page that my students can't edit, but I WANT them to be able to edit it. It's a wiki! For many students, interacting with the course page is their first exposure to editing a wiki, but unfortunately the course page functions differently than the pages they are likely to edit on Wikipedia, or any other MediaWiki site. It would probably be better for students if, once created, the Course Page was just a standard wiki page, like any page one might find on Wikipedia. The guided creation process for faculty is great and simplifies things for them, but the ultimate output of that process needs to be plain text using MediaWiki markup so that it can be used to create a plain-old standard wiki page that anyone can edit. Brianwc (talk) 22:14, 3 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree with everything here, Brianwc. Unfortunately, fixing that core aspect of the extension will require some major reengineering, but we're looking into ways of doing it as easily as possible, separating the parts that should work like a normal wiki (the body of the course page, which should be editable like any other page) from the parts that rely on structured data. It's a very high priority, only tempered by the amount of work it will take versus some other improvements that will be much easier.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 14:14, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Enroll button
Is it possible to somehow make a button to Enroll in template change to Disenroll after enrolling? I know it's not PHP. Dominikmatus (talk) 22:06, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Format of "Courses" page
The "Courses" page is one of the first pages many people see when getting involved with a Wikipedia course; so providing useful information there, in a way that's easy to digest, is of particular importance. It currently shows a list of recent changes to Wikipedia by the course's students, ambassadors, and instructors. It shows them in a very clean layout, which is good; but I think there are three ways the layout could be improved, substantially, to better support student acclamation to Wikipedia.





1. Similarity to existing MediaWiki software features
Since it's important for students to be learning basic use of MediaWiki/Wikipedia, design for a feature like this should consider future steps. When it comes time for a student to learn about watchlists, the User Contributions screen, etc., how easy will that transition be?

I'd like to see a new design that keeps this layout simple and inviting to a newbie, but is also more closely related to the software features they're about to learn.

This has, as I see it, two important benefits:
 * 1) It is still reasonably "clean and simple" (and could be made more so than my quick sketch above).
 * 2) It has design similarities to "watchlist" and other softward features that will support the student's future learning.

-Pete F (talk) 21:52, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

2. Missing features
In order to keep the existing view simple (I assume), features have been left out. I believe convenient links to "diff" and "hist" would offer great benefits -- perhaps not on the first view for new students, but during the course. It would make it easier for students to see specifically what their instructors, ambassadors, and peers are doing, and learn from one another in a very "Wikipedia-like" manner.

The first column in my draft table above might be one way of going about including this. A reduced point size and/or faded color might help to reduce any distraction to newbies the first time they look at this page.

-Pete F (talk) 21:52, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

3. Relevance of specific edits
In an active class, where all participants are working mostly on stuff related to the class, this list is very useful. However, sometimes there are active participants (instructors, ambassadors, or students) who are working on stuff totally unrelated to the class. One highly active Wikipedian can flood this view and render it pretty much useless to the class -- without doing anything "wrong"!

This can be especially significant early on, when students are getting their first look at Wikipedia and the course pages, but when there is relatively little editing going on that is directly related to the class.

It would be good for a course organizer to have:
 * 1) The ability to suppress the table from being displayed (e.g., until the class becomes sufficiently active)
 * 2) The ability to suppress specific rows (e.g., turn off display of edits from a specific ambassador who is also an active admin working on contentious ArbCom cases, RFAs, etc.)

-Pete F (talk) 21:52, 31 January 2014 (UTC)