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
 * 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

 * Allow course leaders to assign articles to students (patch ✅)
 * Allow course leaders to add students to courses (patch ✅)
 * TODO later: Make instructions for adding students more simple and compact.
 * Provide a better way of checking whether a user is part of a course, by including course information at Special:Contributions (patch ✅)
 * Implement Notifications for course events (with email enabled by default) (base patch ✅)
 * Notify all participants of new posts to course talk page (✅)
 * Fix inconsistent database transactions (in progress)
 * Use a conventional wiki page for main page text of course pages (meaning that anyone can edit, and all the normal tools like "what links here", diffs, and contrib histories work as expected).

Medium term goals

 * 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
 * Build other general tools that align with the Growth team roadmap and can replace existing functionality in the extension.

Nice to have

 * More Notifications:
 * Notify students of talk page posts on their articles
 * Notify users when they are added by others to a course role (student, instructor, volunteer)
 * TODO later: 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

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