Wikipedia Education Program



'''Do you use the current course page software? Let us know what changes you would most like to see.


 * The Education Program extension is currently in active use on a number of Wikipedias, with experimental use on other projects (Wikiversity, Wikinews) as well. Andrew Russell Green and Sage Ross are currently working on improving the user experience and squashing the extension's bugs.
 * Bugs and feature requests managed on bugzilla
 * You can sign up to get technical updates about new features and changes to course page software.
 * monthly Status updates

Current plans
Although it is functional and meets some of the needs that aren't met by using conventional wiki pages to organize educational assignments, the current user experience for the course pages and other elements of the Education Program extension need to be overhauled. We anticipate that Andrew will continue developing it gradually, while the Growth team may or may not develop a more general system for supporting in-person outreach efforts later on. So we plan to redesign the current system piece by piece, making the new elements as modular as possible.

Near term goals

 * Fix inconsistent database transactions (in progress)
 * Make some improvements to the behavior of course pages and the layout of course page editing
 * Remove the fields for changing the name and title of a course. (Making such changes is rarely needed, and very buggy.)
 * Separate the page text section from the other editable fields, and collapse the latter by default. See mockups for collapsed and expanded view.
 * Make course pages editable by anyone, but only show the non-page-text fields for those with the rights to edit them.
 * More Notifications (FBOA students Jeff and JJ are working on these):
 * Notify students of talk page posts on their articles
 * Notify users when they are added by others to a course role (student, instructor, volunteer)

Medium term goals

 * Begin work on general editor campaign tools, which will eventually replace the EducationProgram extension
 * Early work will focus on defining groups through signup campaigns
 * Create a way to extract lists of student usernames for one or many courses at once
 * Implement Workflows for the initial steps of event (course) creation

Nice to have

 * Add a step in the enrollment process to (by default, with opt-out) enable email for all notifications, and get emails from users who have not set one.


 * Fix students table bugs (these represent legacy code issues, but are probably easy enough to be worth patching)
 * Make non-existent articles in students table behave better (redlinks, letting user add more than one, don't break when the article gets created then re-added)
 * Convert article urls ( a common mistake among students) into titles


 * Provide a way for students to request help, wherever they are on Wikipedia.
 * Make iterative improvements to the course activity feeds.
 * Inline diffs like WritKeeper's script
 * Basic stats on recent and total activity for a given course
 * Style the course links so they are more obviously clickable links (patch ✅)

Long term goals

 * Turn main course page into something awesome (with modular parts that may appear or not based on use case and which user is using it)
 * Integrate trainings into course pages
 * Integrate a course creation wizard into course pages

User testing
As we get closer to a redesign of the main course page UI/UX, Sage will do lightweight user testing. Let him know if you want to participate.

History
The Education Program extension is currently in use on English Wikipedia and a number of other Wikimedia wikis. After initial development by Jeroen De Dauw (see initial Software design document), it was deployed on English Wikipedia in late 2012, and has been used actively since the beginning of 2013, with maintenance by Jeroen until July 2013. In October 2013, Andrew Russell Green began working as the primary developer of the extension.

earlier tools and related documents

 * [[Media:Engineering support for the Wikipedia Education Program.pdf|Document outlining the state of things before the current extension]]
 * http://toolserver.org/~fschulenburg/student-o-meter.php
 * http://toolserver.org/~fschulenburg/courseinfo.php?courseid=7