Grants:Project/AfLIA/Wikipedia in African Libraries/Timeline

This project is funded by a Project Grant

Timeline for AfLIA

Timeline	Date
Awareness Campaign	Begins July, 2020
Wikipedian-in-Residence at AfLIA	Begins August, 2020
Curriculum Development Consultant in AfLIA	Begins August, 2020
Pre-training research	Begins September, 2020
Pre-test of adopted curriculum	November – December
Translation of course materials into French and Portuguese	Begins November, 2020
Registration for Cohort one (1), Continent-wide online training for Librarians	Begins January 2021
Training Sessions for Cohort one (1)	Begins February 2021
First evaluation of the project	Begins February, 2021
Registration for Cohort Two (2), continent-wide online training for African Librarians	Begins in April 2021
Training Sessions for Cohort Two (2)	Begins May 2021
Second Evaluation of the project	July, 2021
Wikimedia Foundation Project Grant ends	July, 2021

Monthly updates

Please prepare a brief project update each month, in a format of your choice, to share progress and learnings with the community along the way. Submit the link below as you complete each update.

June 2020

Project kick -off

Planning for project administration, discussions on capacities needed to make the project a success, creation of timelines
Need for curriculum development expert suggested by project advisors and integrated into the project plans
Wrote the job specifications for the Wikipedian in Residence and Curriculum Development expert with advice and inputs from project advisers

July 2020

Wikipedian-in-Residence recruitment

Made formal announcement of the grant aflia-receives-grant-from-wikimedia-foundation/
Posted the WiR opening job-opening-wikipedian-in-residence/
Posted the job opening for the Curriculum Development consultant job-opening-curriculum-development-consultant/
Promotion of the WiR and CDC through AfLIA networks and African Wikimedia communities

Awareness Campaign

Drawn up a project communications plan
Building up a mailing list for the project's newsletter

August 2020

Wikipedian-in-Residence Recruitment

Thirty one applications were received for AfLIA's Wikipedian-in-Residence; such a rich pool of qualified and passionate Wikimedians to select from! Alice Kibombo was eventually chosen to be AfLIA's Wikipedian in Residence. Alice is a librarian and comes a rich background of working in Uganda Wikimedia community https://web.aflia.net/aflia-gets-a-wikipedian-in-residence/

Awareness Campaign

Call for more subscribers to the project's newsletter distributed to African Wikimedia communities and shared on different platforms online [1]103 people have already indicated interest in receiving updates about the project.

Curriculum Development Consultant

The call for a Curriculum Development Consultant (CDC) attracted six(6) applications. After interviews on Skype and Zoom, Prof. Rosemary Shafack was chosen as the CDC. Shafack has years of experience as a librarian, an educator and a curriculum expert. She has been working in the African Library sector as Chairman Africa Section, IFLA and a representative of Central Africa in the Governing Council of AfLIA. https://web.aflia.net/aflia-signs-on-a-curriculum-development-consultant-wikipedia-in-african-libraries-project/ She will resume work on September 1, 2020.

September 2020

A pre-training survey was sent out to African librarians to determine their level of digital skills, prejudices and ability to learn online https://web.aflia.net/invitation-to-complete-pre-research-survey-wikiaflibs-survey/ Librarians were reached through different avenues to ensure that a great number were reached.

October

AfLIA's Wikipedian in Residence led African Librarians to celebrate Open Access Week on Wikipedia with translations into local African languages https://web.aflia.net/2020-open-access-week-aflia-unique-celebration/

November

The call for Pilot Cohort for the Wikipedia in African Libraries course was sent out on 3rd November https://web.aflia.net/wikipedia-in-african-libraries-course-call-for-participants-for-pilot-testing/ Forty two librarians were admitted for the pilot test out of the one hundred and eighty that applied. The rest later chose to join the course in Cohort 1 or 2.

December

Pilot Cohort

Participants on the pilot cohort was on-boarded to the Moodle platform to test the adapted OCLC curriculum. Participants tested the curriculum in English language only in the following areas;

Wikipedia for you, your library, and your community
Evaluating Wikipedia with a critical eye
Contribute to the Wikipedia body of knowledge
Wikipedia empowers your community

Meet & Greet

There was also a Meet & Greet for Swahili Speaking participants with the Wikimedia User Group, Tanzania.

January, 2021

Call for participants Cohort 1

The call for participants for Cohort 1 of the Wikipedia in African Libraries course went out https://web.aflia.net/wikipedia-in-african-libraries-course-cohort-1-registration-opens/

Pilot Cohort ends with evaluation

The Pilot Cohort came to an end during the month immediately after an evaluation was held to know what worked and what did not work with the adapted curriculum, learning platform and mode of delivery.

Curriculum

The curriculum was reworked to reflect findings and observations from the pilot testing. It was divided into;

Section 1 - 1 unit
Section 2 - 1 unit
Section 3 -2 units
Section 4 - 1 unit
Section 5 - 3 units

Translation

Teaching materials were translated into French and Portuguese

February, 2021

Cohort 1

Five hundred and fourteen participants were admitted to Cohort one as follows;

Cohort 1 participants
S/N	Country	Participants
1	Algeria	4
2	Benin Republic	18
3	Botswana	26
4	Burkina Faso	1
5	Burundi	3
6	Cameroon	5
7	Central African Republic	1
8	Democratic Republic of Congo	3
9	Cote D'Ivoire	19
10	Eswatini	1
11	Egypt	20
12	Ethiopia	1
13	Gabon	3
14	Gambia	2
15	Ghana	65
16	Kenya	71
17	Lesotho	2
18	Morocco	2
19	Namibia	27
20	Nigeria	100
21	Rwanda	1
22	Somali	2
23	South Africa	15
24	Sudan	5
25	Tanzania	26
26	Togo	1
27	Tunisia	5
28	Uganda	56
29	Zambia	8
30	Zimbabwe	16

The opening session for the cohort was held on 4th February, 2021.

March, 2021

Interactions took place with participants on Moodle platform where the resources including assignments while WhatsApp groups were formed for more engagements with the participants. Live sessions and office hours were held weekly in the different languages. Events during the month are outlined here[[2]]

April, 2021

The course continued and participants who missed out on assignments and live sessions were followed up. Remedial trainings for held for those who had dropped off.

May, 2021

Training for Cohort 1 was rounded within up this month and progress tracked and collated for award of certificates to all who finished the coursework including assignments.

June, 2021

The call for Cohort 2 went out - https://web.aflia.net/wikipedia-in-african-libraries-course-wikiaflibs-call-for-cohort-2/ The course took on 28th June, 2021

July,2021

Considering the fact that the 2nd Cohort is the last window for a facilitated-learning/teaching of the course, the registration link was kept open so that a mop-up of intending participants can be done.

Is your final report due but you need more time?

Extension request

New end date

The new end date for the project is 30th September, 2021. The report will be submitted on or before 30th September, 2021.

Rationale

Background

From the pre-training research done at the beginning of the project, the need to test-run the adapted curriculum form OCLC Wikipedia and Libraries: Better Together curriculum became obvious. Thus, the adapted curriculum was tested within five (5) weeks (16th November – 20th December, 2020). This was not originally configured into the project at the proposal stage. This is the link for the call for participants to test-run the adapted curriculum: https://web.aflia.net/wikipedia-in-african-libraries-course-call-for-participants-for-pilot-testing/ This is the link to the dashboard of the pilot test cohort - https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/AfLIA/Wikipedia_in_African_Libraries_-_Pilot_Cohort_(November_-_December_2020)/home

This ate into the project time. Also, the WiR has worked non-stop from mid-August 2020 until present and may experience burnout which may affect the project outcomes if she does not take at least 15days off in June to rest, rejuvenate and get ready for Cohort 2 of the course.

Purpose

The extra two months being requested will be used to;

Round off Cohort 2 of the course which is slated to take off on Monday, 28th June, 2021 and run through to the first week of September, 2021.
Leave enough time for the WiR and the Evaluator to write up reports on the project for Wikimedia Foundation.

Finances for the extension

The extension will not require additional funds for payment of the WiR’s salary for the extra two months. It should be noted that;

The WiR is paid $1,350 monthly. Thus, two months salary is $2700
In the project, the budget allocation for the WiR’s travel to attend AfLIA’s 2021 conference is $2000. However, the conference was virtual and only the registration fee was taken from it.
The WiR was on unpaid leave for 15days in June thus she received only half-month pay for June, 2021.
The WiR resumed work on 15th August, 2020 thus only half-month salary was paid to her.

Thus, AfLIA has sufficient funds to pay the WiR for the additional months of August and September, 2021.

Request

All of the above have been discussed with the project advisers and working committee who all agree on the need for extending the lifespan of the project.

I therefore request that you kindly grant us an extension of the project period from the originally scheduled date of July 31st 2021 to September 30th, 2021 without additional funding from the Wikimedia Foundation.

Approval

Noting here that the Program Officer approval is posted at Grants talk:Project/AfLIA/Wikipedia in African Libraries/Timeline. -- JTud (WMF), Grants Administrator (talk) 18:39, 16 August 2021 (UTC)