Grants:Project/Research & Engagement Project/Designing a template for a sustainable education program

statusnot selected

Project Grants

Designing a template for a sustainable education program

summaryDesigning a template for a sustainable education program.

targetIndic language versions of Wikipedia, Commons, and Wikidata

amount44427 USD

grantee• FromPunjab• FebinCtu

advisor• Manavpreet Kaur• charlie4404

contact• medfrompunjabgmail.com

this project needs...

volunteer

created on17:41, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Friendly space expectations

Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

What problem are you trying to solve by doing this project? This problem should be small enough that you expect it to be completely or mostly resolved by the end of this project. Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.

The focus area would be the Engagement of Education Institutions for the growth of Indic Wikimedia Projects. Education is not only limited to acquiring skills and knowledge, but also involves sharing the knowledge, helping people to learn, and supporting them to evaluate what they learn. In Wikipedia context, our majority of consumers are students. In order to facilitate creating resources for individuals seeking information in non-English languages, it is important to engage students in this process of co-creation to extend the opportunity of access to knowledge.

Indian communities have been quite conscious of bringing new editors to Wikipedia because of past experiences with some education programs. The education programs without proper training and mentorship lead to the creation of content that does not meet the quality expectations and have lead to losing the community’s faith in involving students. From our experience of working with students, we have substantial grounds to believe that with the right guidance and monitoring, this engagement can help us expand the communities and content on various WikiProjects. In the proposed program, we will study the previously organized education programs, their outcomes, challenges, and issues. We will also design and practice a methodology on a structured and governed education program to observe the difference in engagement and outcome. As a final outcome, we expect to create and share a template for a sustainable education program in India.

There are some identified concerns about previous engagements that we intend to address in the proposed project. The details are as follows-

• Unmapped Partnerships: The Wikimedians invest a lot of effort in planning and organizing awareness programs, activities and building partnerships with institutions. The development and outcome of these initiatives are based on the ability to be continuously engaged with a project which is sometimes difficult to do in a volunteer capacity. The partnership of Punjabi Wikimedians with Chandigarh University, Gulzar Group of Institutions, Khanna, Khalsa College of Women, Ludhiana were not able to progress in spite of their remarkable engagement initially. The reason for the decline in engagement was the non-availability of a mentor at these institutions to ensure students’ engagement with WIki Projects thus leading to losing the partnerships.
• Compromised quality of content generated in Education Programs & Community Distrust: The quality of content created by students has been often questioned by the communities because of the quality of edits being produced. Lack of training, guidance, and reviewing are the major reasons for the low-quality standards of edits thus leading to the community’s distrust.
• Engagement: We have seen the extensive engagement of students when they are being guided and trained and the engagement dramatically declines when there is no follow-up or continuous engagement.
• Episodic and limited growth of projects: The growth of projects depends on the engagement of editors, bringing new and retaining old editors. Partnership with education institutions can help us expand not only readership but also editorship on Wiki projects. The students and faculty if engaged well, can lead to the generation of quality content. The engagement has not been explored much. Periodic engagements lead to episodic growth but are often not fruitful because of disengagement.
• No Template on a sustainable education program: The past education programs, their failures have been discussed, but they have not been reviewed to analyze the issues and challenges in order to design corrective/ precautionary measures for building a fruitful and sustainable program.
• Low awareness and engagement in Indic language projects: Considering the engagement recently during the WikiGap-Wiki4Womxn 2021 program, there were 194 registrations by students from 19 institutions in India for training on Wikipedia editing. Out of 194, only 24 registered for Indic languages.

What is your solution to this problem?

For the problem you identified in the previous section, briefly describe your how you would like to address this problem. We recognize that there are many ways to solve a problem. We’d like to understand why you chose this particular solution, and why you think it is worth pursuing. Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.

Our opinions are based on the status of previous regional Wiki engagements and experience of running a Wiki club. As faculty members, we have been able to engage students with the three activities and two webinars organized remotely during and after the lockdown where the engagement of individuals with volunteer projects was hugely impacted in the pandemic. The points of consideration for the proposed project are as follows-

• Planned Partnerships: Building collaborations with a plan on identified engagement methodology and goals can help sustain the partnerships. Along with the institutions where we have been engaging with students and intend to start formal WikiClubs, we have identified the potential partners for future activities. We have collaborated with PGIMER, Chandigarh for Awareness Program on Organs Talk and are in discussion to initiate a collaborative project on creating a Medical dictionary in Punjabi. With an intention to expand the Syberthon project, we are in conversations with Faculty from Madras University for collaboration.
• Commitment to Quality: As lack of training, guidance, and reviewing are the major reasons for the low-quality standards of edits thus leading to the community’s distrust, mentorship and monitoring can help address the issues. As one of the activities, we intend to organize review-a-thons to improve the quality of content, expanding stubs rather than edit-a-thons to create new articles can be one of the steps to ensure commitment to quality.
• Engagement: We have seen a better engagement of students when they are being guided and trained and the engagement dramatically declines when there is no follow-up or continuous engagement. The program coordinator can keep the engagements on track.
• Extending support for the growth of projects: The growth of projects depends on the engagement of editors, bringing new and retaining old editors. Partnership with education institutions can help us expand not only readership but also editorship on Wiki projects. Having a Program Coordinator with the assigned responsibility can keep participation on track. Timely evaluation of the contribution, needs, and outcome can play a major role in the growth of the project.
• Creating a Template on a sustainable education program: Reviewing the shortcomings, challenges, and issues of the previous programs can prove assistive in designing corrective/ precautionary measures for building a fruitful and sustainable program.
• Raising awareness and engagement in Indic language projects: The 24 students who registered for Indic languages, belonged to the institutions where the grantees have been keeping them engaged with Wiki projects for the last year. The outcome of the training & edit-a-thon was only those 24 students creating content.

We believe it’s important to educate them about the importance and need of information in Indic languages. Indic language typing could have been one of the associated concerns, awareness programs and training can help us counter such challenges.

Project goals

What are your goals for this project? Your goals should describe the top two or three benefits that will come out of your project. These should be benefits to the Wikimedia projects or Wikimedia communities. They should not be benefits to you individually. Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.

• Growth of Indic WikiProjects- Wikipedia, Commons & Wikidata,
• Quality Content, and
• Sustainable partnerships/education program

Project impact

How will you know if you have met your goals?

For each of your goals, we’d like you to answer the following questions:

1. During your project, what will you do to achieve this goal? (These are your outputs.)
2. Once your project is over, how will it continue to positively impact the Wikimedia community or projects? (These are your outcomes.)

For each of your answers, think about how you will capture this information. Will you capture it with a survey? With a story? Will you measure it with a number? Remember, if you plan to measure a number, you will need to set a numeric target in your proposal (i.e. 45 people, 10 articles, 100 scanned documents). Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.

Under favorable circumstances, the project would be considered successful if we-

• Organize/Participate in eight activities (training/edit-a-thon,etc.)
• A discussion with a medical panel on translation
• MoU with two institutions and collaboration with two partner organizations
• 2 Awareness program with regional school/Groups as a part of Syberthon & WWWW
• Resource Video on Process/Guidelines- 02
• Creating a template on a sustainable education program for the Wikimedia community over the course of subsequent months.
• Reaching the defined participation and content goals

Do you have any goals around participation or content?

Are any of your goals related to increasing participation within the Wikimedia movement, or increasing/improving the content on Wikimedia projects? If so, we ask that you look through these three metrics, and include any that are relevant to your project. Please set a numeric target against the metrics, if applicable.

About Wikipedia Articles & Dictionary, we cannot currently specify numeric targets, but setting those targets will be part of the project. We hope to reach-

• • At least 300 medical words (translation)
  • At least 200 medical images uploaded on commons
  • Quality content on Wikipedia (Improving/expanding/creating articles)- at least 100
• New Users- At least 40
• Number of languages for projects (based on the Club’s members and participation in editathons: minimum 2

Project plan

Activities

Tell us how you'll carry out your project. What will you and other organizers spend your time doing? What will you have done at the end of your project? How will you follow-up with people that are involved with your project?

Review/Analysis of past Education Programs

This section is focused on Research & Designing and includes-

Identifying Challenges & Issues:

We will do a meta-review of the Education programs organized in India in the past, their activities and outcome, in order to identify the issues/challenges. There have been some ongoing activities with some education institutions that were not labelled as “Education initiatives”, but we will also consider those for reviewing the pattern of engagement of growth.

Prepare Countermeasures and action items:

After analyzing the issues, we will design a hypothesis based on regional circumstances, approaches, project designs, engagement and their outcomes. We will also review the existing resources to gather information about best practices from other global projects. Some of the reference resources that will be reviewed are as follows-

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikidata_for_Education_Consultation_Summary.pdf&page=1
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:Wikidata_for_Education
• https://wikimediafoundation.org/our-work/education/reading-wikipedia-in-the-classroom/
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Understanding_Wikimedia_Affiliates_Evaluation_in_Education.pdf
• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wekxbA21QM9ZcXFw0aKkKFc-jl8DEEhCly8SWZ8wJNQ/edit#gid=509961721

Note: We will keep on expanding the resource list.

Designing the methodology for the program:

We will design our own methodology following the programs that were successfully organized regionally and will share guidelines on engagement, retention and impact.

PILOT: We have been engaged with students from 10 different Indic languages since 2019 with Syberthon (creating content for Cyber awareness), Medicine (WWWW, Organ Talk. etc.) and Gender Gap activities. Our experience of working with students/education institutions is the reason we believe we need to engage more actively with students and also to do a comparative analysis of activities in order to run an active education program and to create models for future usage.

Note: Considering the guidelines we are keeping it concise. If required more details can be shared on our pilot.

Also, our advisors have experience of building partnerships with the educational institutions and running education initiatives-

Manavpreet Kaur has been engaged with education initiatives since 2014 and has brought many students to the movement who also grew to become movement organizers/leaders. She has the experience of working with students from different fields and different levels of education as well.

Praveen Das is the regional Partnerships Manager from India and has been approached by many leading institutions from India for engagement in wiki projects. The experience of our advisors will help us frame guidelines to create regionally relevant and sustainable education program guidelines

Note: If required more details can be shared on their work.

Wiki-Club Activities

This section contains information about the focus projects and the activities we intend to organize. During our pilot we were able to establish connections with the Cyber Cell, Punjab and a premier Medical and Research Institution in the region. Considering the regional need for the content, we will primarily focus on organizing the following activities but we are open to expanding the scope depending upon the community support and student participation.

Wikipedia (Syberthon, Gender Gap, WWWW etc.)

• Awareness session on Wikipedia-Indic languages, its Importance & need
• Training on editing/expanding/translating Wikipedia articles
• Review-a-thon/Edit-a-thon
• Reviewing the content

Commons (Medical Images)

• Training on Commons
• Uploading Pictures
• Translation of File Descriptions/Captions

Dictionary (Medical/Science Dictionary)

• Identifying ideal portal for the task- Wiktionary or Wikidata
• Creating dictionary
• Review by Medical expert

Awareness Programs/Discussions

• A discussion with a medical panel on translation
• 2 Awareness program with regional school/Groups as a part of Syberthon & WWWW

Reporting

• A meta-review report on education initiatives in the region
• A report on the project and outcomes
• Video Resources on “Guidelines for activities”
• Creating a template on a sustainable education program for the Wikimedia community over the course of subsequent months.
• Recording the experience in a documentary for sharing with communities

Covid Consideration

All the partner organisations have a formal understanding of unpredictable scenarios with Covid situation. The education institutions and the partner organisations are committed to take all precautions for in-person activities and prepared to move the activities to online platform as well. In 2020, we were able to keep the students engaged with Wiki initiatives and have identified processes to cater to any such needs in future.

Budget

How you will use the funds you are requesting? List bullet points for each expense. (You can create a table later if needed.) Don’t forget to include a total amount, and update this amount in the Probox at the top of your page too!

S.No	Category	No. of Units	Cost per unit (USD)	Total cost (USD)	Remarks
1.	Program Coordinator-20hrs per week (52 weeks)	02	12/hour	24960	Coordinators for 2 institutions
2.	Medical Reviewer-70 Hours	01	30/hr	2100	Reviewing the translated medical content
3.	Travel and accommodation	-	-	1500	For Trainers, or to attend a meeting/workshop/training
4.	Office Supplies	01	-	750
5.	Merchandise for Participants	50	-	2000	Certificates, Stickers, Prizes, etc.
6.	Activity Support	-	-	2000	Rental Space/ Refreshment /Promotion/ Banner/ Misc.etc.
7.	Institutional Support			2000
8.	Video Production “Guidelines for activities”	02	-	1500	Process video for records
9.	Documentary	01	-	1000	Experience sharing
10.	Contingency expenses (7.5% of total expenses)	-	-	2836
11.	Fiscal Sponsor Charges (10% of the total expenses)			3781
12.	Total	-	-	44427

Community engagement

How will you let others in your community know about your project? Why are you targeting a specific audience? How will you engage the community you’re aiming to serve at various points during your project? Community input and participation helps make projects successful.

We will post this on the Education Mailing list. We will also request for a slot to share this in the next Education Hours. Considering we are based in Punjab, we will also reach out to the regional UG via mailing list. After confirmation of participants' language, we will reach out to respective communities via mailing list and village pump.

Get involved

Participants

Please use this section to tell us more about who is working on this project. For each member of the team, please describe any project-related skills, experience, or other background you have that might help contribute to making this idea a success.

FromPunjab- She is a researcher, a Science major. She is a mentor at one of the partner institutions. She is interested in research and has been involved in raising awareness about Wiki projects. She has also created a Wiki club in her institution and has been engaged with Wiki4Women 2020 & 2021, and Syberthon. The club intends to support science editing in Indic languages.

FebinCtu- He is a researcher and mentor at one of the partner institutions. He is a cyber security expert and has been running a Wiki club in his institution and has been engaged with Wiki4Women 2020 & 2021 and four iterations of Syberthon 2020 and has also co-organized two webinars for the club.

Manavpreet Kaur- A Ph.D. PDF by qualification, a long term Wikimedian. She has led various initiatives in India and has good community understanding. She has been the lead of various projects like- Wiki Conference India 2016, Wiki Women for Women Wellbeing, Women Train the Trainers Program, Syberthon 2020, etc. She will be the Advisor to this project. She has been extensively engaged in designing the proposal. As an observer she will be providing us insights and inputs at relevant intervals. She will also be leading the partnership discussions.

Praveen Das- He is the Regional Partnerships Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. He has been guiding us in designing the initiative and will also be the advisor to this project.

We have 19+20 (39) students in our WikiClub who have been participating in various activities. We have made a conscious choice of not having them endorse. We can share the details if required.

Community notification

You are responsible for notifying relevant communities of your proposal, so that they can help you! Depending on your project, notification may be most appropriate on a Village Pump, talk page, mailing list, etc.--> Please paste links below to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions. Need notification tips?

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-pa/2021-March/000062.html

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2021-March/007508.html

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/eduwiki/2021-March/000120.html

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/education-collab/2021-March/000502.html

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2021-March/014966.html

In meetings notifications

We Shared details about our project with research community during the WikiWorkshop2021 on April 14, 2021 and Wiki Office Hours - Wikimedia Foundation education team meeting on March 23, 2021.

Endorsements

Do you think this project should be selected for a Project Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project below! (Other constructive feedback is welcome on the discussion page).

• I support this project. Dharampal Singh (talk) 17:47, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
• I support this project. Too many edit-a-thons end up being a "one-off" event (the work doesn't continue when the project has ended). I think it's a great idea to build sustainability right into the project goals as this proposal has done. Redwidgeon (talk) 22:29, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
• I support this project. Dugal harpreet (talk) 15:09, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
• I support this project .Aliva Sahoo (talk) 04:39, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
• Most Wikipedia education programs are not sustainable and depend heavily on a Wikipedian who is able to instruct students. This takes a lot of his/her personal time and eventually the program usually crashes down. I'd be very interested in hearing what the Wikimedia community can improve in this respect, and what we can learn from US Education program, which is much more sustainable than most others. Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 08:44, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
•  Support Rajdeep ghuman (talk) 10:15, 23 March 2021 (UTC)