Education/News/March 2024/Reading Wikipedia in Ukraine – the course for educators is now available on demand

“Reading Wikipedia” in Ukraine – the course for educators is now available on demand

Last year we developed a Ukrainian adaptation of the “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom” program. The first installment took place in the summer of 2023 when 300 Ukrainian educators had an opportunity to study for five weeks and complete a final assignment designing an integration of Wikipedia in their lessons. In the end 64 people successfully passed the whole course.

Summary: In late February the Wikipedia course for Ukrainian educators became publicly available as a self-directed, asynchronous program. Created by Wikimedia Ukraine within the international “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom” initiative, the course is hosted by Prometheus, Ukraine’s biggest MOOC platform.

The first installment was successful (you can read more about its results in the Diff post), but our next challenge was to figure out how to make the course accessible anytime.

To achieve that we reworked the course and divided it into two parts:

a basic version of the course that is constantly available on the Prometheus platform as a self-directed, asynchronous course (with only instructional materials and tests, no final assignment graded by the trainer);
an advanced version of the course for graduates of the basic version (in-depth work with the course trainer, which will include a final assignment on lesson design).

After some implementation work, the basic version went live in late February. To promote it we’ve launched an ad campaign on Facebook and held an introductory webinar led by Maryna Chala, Certified Trainer of the international program. Over 80 people signed up for the webinar and indicated they plan to pass the whole course on Prometheus; close to 30 people attended the event in real time.

We expect to launch the first installment of the advanced course later this year, once we’ve gathered several dozen graduates of the basic version. We hope to share more detailed results and learnings with the international community once the advanced course is launched.