Wikipedia:Education program/Educators

Get involved in the Wikipedia Education Program

1. Familiarize yourself with Wikipedia: Using our experience of working with educators who assigned their students to edit Wikipedia, we created this online orientation for educators. It will walk you through Wikipedia-editing basics, tips for using Wikipedia in the classroom, and some sample classroom assignments.
2. Use your resources: In the training, you'll notice the 'Resources' link on the top. Here, you'll find online versions of our step-by-step guides as well as handouts you'll find useful for your students.
3. At the end of the online training, you will be taken to Wiki Ed's Course Dashboards. There, you can build a syllabus for your Wikipedia assignment that incorporates best practices for teaching with Wikipedia and that meets the needs of your individual course. At the end of the process, you will have a ready-to-use plan for your Wikipedia assignment that you can publish to your course page.
4. Create a Course Page: You'll also see some important information about creating a Course Page. Creating a page will add you to the list of classes for this term, and it will allow you to easily track the work of your students on Wikipedia.
5. Get your students to enroll on your Course page: Once you've created your Course Page, you should distribute the link to each of your students who will edit Wikipedia. This will enable you to track the work of your students both individually and see a compilation of all of their edits from the past week by clicking on the Activity Feed. It will also allow Wiki Ed staff to provide your students with timely feedback throughout the term.

Get help!

• General assistance: If ever you need help, either with advice on your assignment, questions while editing, or anything at all, you should visit the education noticeboard and create a new section to ask our volunteers for help!
• FAQ: If you're looking for general information about the Wikipedia Education Program or whether your class assignment is a fit for Wikipedia, please see this FAQ page.
• General guidelines: See this advice for educators for more guidelines.

Designing your assignment

How do you design an assignment that meets your students' learning needs while positively impacting Wikipedia? After six terms of working with professors, students, volunteers, and Wikipedia editors, our program participants have compiled a thorough database of past assignments, the resources professors used to create them, and grading rubrics. Please check out the suggestions for various assignment types.

Student assignments should always be carried out using a course page set up by the instructor. It is usually best to develop articles on the students' user pages, or as drafts. After evaluation, the additions may go on to become a Wikipedia article or be published in an existing article.