Wikipedia Education Foundation is a fantastic program that helps integrate the writing of wikipedia articles into courses. Wiki Edu spun off from Wikipedia proper a couple of years ago, and they’ve done a ton of work in that time to put together training materials for students and teachers and organizational tools to help manage classes.
However, it can still be a little confusing as to how to get started in Wiki Edu. Below is a step by step process to help your students join your Wiki Edu Course and navigate back and forth with Wikipedia.
1. After an instructor has joined Wiki Edu and set up a course, she receives an email with a link for their course dashboard. The link that Wikipedia sends will have an enrollment code built in, so that your students can automatically join the course. If students navigate to the page without following the link, they will likely need the enrollment code which can be found at the end of the link. For example, here’s a link for the course dashboard for Remembering the Asian Pacific War: https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/courses/OU/Remembering_the_Asian_Pacific_War_(Spring_2017)?enroll=xxxxxxx. You can see at the end of the link a bit of text that says “enroll=xxxxxxx.” Whatever comes after the “=” is the code for enrolling in the course.
2. Once a student reaches the course dashboard, she can log in to her account using the button at the top right:
3. After she logs in to Wiki Education Foundation, she should click on “join course” in the actions tab on the right hand side of the screen. If it asks for a passcode, she uses the enrollment code.
4. The student should now be a member of the course. When you are in Wikipedia reading an article, you can return to the course by first clicking on your username at the top of the screen:
5. On your user page, you should have our course listed at the top of the page. Click this link to go to the Wikipedia page for our course.
6. From there you can return to the Wikipedia Education Foundation dashboard for the course.
For more information on Wikipedia assignments and the Wiki Edu program, you can check out my posts below or wikiedu.org
