WikiLearn/Pilot report

Executive Summary

The Wikimedia Movement Strategy outlines ten recommendations that would allow Wikimedia to achieve its strategic goal of becoming the “essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge,” where anyone who shares this vision will be able to join. One of these recommendations emphasizes the need to “invest in skills and leadership development.” This investment would allow volunteers worldwide to develop the necessary skills to grow their contributions to the free knowledge movement.

The Foundation’s Community Development team recognizes that “access” is a significant barrier to skill development in the Wikimedia movement. Many learning and development experiences happen at movement convenings such as Wikimania and other regional events. These events continue to be an excellent opportunity for volunteers to connect, collaborate and develop new skills to support their movement contributions. However, many volunteers are unable to attend these events for several reasons, such as limited access to fiscal resources, travel restrictions, and paid time off from work.

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated these inequities more than ever. With global restrictions limiting in-person events, our team recognized that moving learning online was necessary to continue training and development in the movement and launched the WikiLearn pilot. The main goal of the pilot was to understand how to facilitate scalable online learning to a global audience around capacity development.

Online learning will allow for a more global approach to learning and development moving forward for volunteers, echoing the recommendations from the Movement Strategy conversations.

Pilot Design

Launched in February 2021, our team facilitated two 8-week courses (delivered during 2-hour live sessions per week) to 67 participants in total. Our team promoted the pilot application on ~20 movement communication channels to increase diversity among the final applicant pool.

We believed it was necessary to schedule the weekly 2-hour session that worked favourably for every participant. It was critical to ensure that live sessions were at a convenient time for participants in each course. During the acceptance period, we asked participants to provide times they could ideally attend the weekly session. We then prioritized a timeslot convenient to the most significant number of people. However, we could not find a time that worked for all volunteers due to the global spread of interested applicants (we had representation from ~7 timezones in total). We provided a video recording of the live session and asynchronous feedback on assignments for volunteers who still expressed interest in the pilot but could not attend the scheduled session. We held weekly office hours with course instructors to provide participants extra support if need.

The two courses that launched were as part of the pilot:

1. Partnership Building: This course focused on teaching volunteers how to develop meaningful programmatic and organizational partnerships within the movement and with external partners
2. Identifying and Addressing Harassment: This course focused on supporting the Foundation’s Anti-Harassment Program and help administrators, functionaries and users with advanced rights respond to on- and off-wiki harassment that encourages harm reduction and empathy.

We prioritized these areas for two reasons: first, critical Foundation programs such as the Anti-Harassment Program require community readiness to succeed. Administrators and functionaries play a pivotal role in addressing harassment in the movement. Increasing their ability to identify and address harassment in a way that prioritizes the reduction of harm experienced by targets of harassment increases movement sustainability and tackles a key barrier in movement growth; harassment. Harassment creates an unwelcoming environment and hampers overall volunteer engagement and retention. Second, the community has asked for support in growing skills that can help amplify local efforts, such as building meaningful partnerships with external organizations. Feedback from our Wikimania 2019 program as well as needs-assessment survey results from regional conferences surfaced partnership building as a top development need.

Overall Findings

Over 128 volunteers applied to participate in the WikiLearn pilot program.

• In the Building Partnerships course, respondents (n=18) to the final survey overwhelmingly found the class helpful to their Wikimedia work with a 100% overall satisfaction rate.
• In the Identifying and Addressing Harassment course, respondents (n=14) found the class helpful in their practice as “responders” to harassment with an overall satisfaction rate of 93%.
• Overall, 97% of participants would participate in another online course from the Community Development team.

Project overview

This section describes the context and rationale for the Community Development team's undertaking of the Wikilearn pilot project.

Context

There are clear needs for up-to-date, high-quality training resources across the movement. Whole communities are left behind from engaging with the latest technology, tools, and practices because of a lack of training resources in general or a lack of suitable training resources for those communities (whether in terms of language, medium of instruction, or applicability to the local context). Much of the existing training materials are under-utilized, even by people who would gladly have used them had they known they existed. Other training materials are incomplete or unmaintained (and out of date). And many things just don't have any training materials available at all.

On the other hand, online learning has the benefit of being multi-lingual, reaching people anywhere they may be as long as they have Internet access, enabling repeat learning and reference to course materials, and supporting learning at each learner's pace. Even online learning involving live instruction is possible. However, that would also require access to high-speed Internet to interact with the instructor over an audio/video connection.

The Community Development team thus began planning an online learning pilot that would provide necessary insight to scale online learning to the movement. The COVID-19 pandemic has added urgency to support an online learning platform as it has eliminated traditional training opportunities at Wikimedia global and regional in-person gatherings. The team decided to proceed to a pilot project using standard Learning Management System (LMS) software, and picked the free-software Moodle for the pilot project's underlying platform.

The Community Development team delivered two parallel interactive courses, both in English, relying on live instruction and discussion in video calls and on assignments for learners to complete between lessons.

Rationale

With the pandemic preventing in-person training, piloting an online learning platform became the primary focus for the Community Development team. It was an opportunity to devote significant time to exploring this complex challenge.

It was clear the team did not have sufficient information to design and build the ideal solution addressing the diverse needs of online learning across the movement, so experimenting seemed a good way to quickly test some hypotheses and gain concrete results regarding the experience of online learning (and online teaching) in the Wikimedia movement, collecting insights on both questions the team had in mind to begin with, and issues that were not anticipated.

The team chose to pilot with two courses at once, on different topics, with different learner cohorts and different instructors, to increase the amount of insight we gain during the pilot period, and to at least minimally make up for specific phenomena that may arise more out of the specific topic, group, or instructor than the online learning platform and experience themselves.

Due to limited resources, both courses were offered in English. Instruction, as well as assignments, were delivered in English, despite it not being the first language of most participants. This was acknowledged in advance during the application phase of the pilot. It is explicitly a limitation of this pilot program and of its conclusions.

The topics for the pilot courses – Identifying and Addressing Harassment and Partnership Building – were chosen with a view to the focus areas of the Wikimedia Movement Strategy, combined with volunteer preferences expressed in past surveys (e.g. before Wikimania 2019 and the Central and Eastern Europe Meeting 2019 conferences).

We chose to pilot relying on live teaching and individual feedback and grading by the course instructor for each course. This model did mean limited cohort size (to be a manageable workload for the instructors) and dependence on high-speed Internet and availability at a specific time and day of the week for the full duration of the course.

This choice was also influenced by a preference to keep communities connected in the difficult time of the pandemic; we acknowledge further piloting will be needed to understand all aspects of self-paced learning which may include recorded instruction and automated grading, which would generally be quite different in course design and teaching approach.

Design considerations

Based on the above context, our design considerations for these specific pilot courses were:

• The courses would teach principles and techniques in live sessions, and learners would practice them in assignments that would receive grades and individual written feedback.
• Recognizing many Wikimedia volunteers have busy schedules, the courses required a maximum of 6 hours (2 for the live lesson, and up to 1-4 for working on assignments) per week, and usually less.
• In addition to the live lesson, each week offered optional two-hour "office hours" video call with the instructor, where learners could connect and ask questions about the material or their assignments.
• Grades were personal and private, intended as a tool for both learner and teacher to assess the learner's grasp of the material and ability to apply it in the assignments. They were not and won't be made public, nor even shared among the learner cohort.
• Material was divided into topics, and each assignment focused on exercising one topic, skill, or principle.
• The live teaching sessions were recorded and made available to learners inside the platform, to enable people who couldn't attend the live lesson to catch up, as well as to remain a resource for learners to be able to refer back to.
• The instructor's slides were shared after each lesson.
• The assignments were designed to add up to a toolkit or scaffolding for a project each learner could build on, in their local community and context.
• The courses were hosted on a free-software platform (Moodle)
• Easy integration with existing Wikimedia identity (learners used their Wikimedia accounts to log in to the learning platform, using OAuth technology, without needing a password).

Partnership Building course

Course overview and rationale

The pilot course on Partnership Building was conceived as an introduction to partnership building, teaching basics from the ground up. Its target audience was experienced Wikimedians who are inexperienced at partnership-building. In other words, no prior knowledge of partnership-building was assumed, but good familiarity with Wikimedia norms and workflows was assumed.

It aimed to equip learners with good practices for identifying partnership opportunities, creating effective partnership proposals and supporting materials, delivering proposals and negotiating partnership agreements with prospective partners, and evaluating and troubleshooting partnerships.

There was an emphasis on practical, Wikimedia-specific examples, and the assignments were designed to exercise skills and cement understanding of principles in a Wikimedia-specific context and one relevant to the learner.

The instructor and curriculum author was Asaf Bartov, a longtime Wikimedia contributor, former affiliate board member, non-profit founder, and experienced Wikimedia Foundation senior program officer focused on emerging communities. Asaf has a broad understanding of partnership-building in practice in Wikimedia contexts around the world.

Course outline

In addition to the curriculum described in the table below, each live session (except the very first one) opened with around 20 minutes of reviewing last week's homework assignments, showcasing some of the work submitted by learners, discussing different approaches, and clarifying topics that seem insufficiently clear based on the submitted homework.

Week	Learning objectives	Assignments
Week 1	Preparing to partner: Knowing and presenting ourselves Distinguishing partnerships from non-partnerships. recognizing components of effective mission statements recognizing principles of effective self-presentation	Determine: partnership or not-partnership? Review and revise your group's mission statement. Prepare a brief talk presenting your group/affiliate.
Week 2	Preparing to partner: Knowing our prospective partner and partnership Recognizing the importance of your group/affiliate's ecosystem Mapping stakeholders and potential partners Studying a prospective partner via their public Web site, social media presence, press releases, etc.	Prepare stakeholders map and list of potential partners. Study one chosen potential partner in depth and write up your findings (each learner's chosen potential partner was the subject of all the learner's assignments from this point onwards).
Week 3	Preparing to partner: Theory of change and partnership pitch Distilling the value proposition of your partnership Documenting expected cause and effect in a "theory of change", and devising metrics for measuring progress against goals Pitching a partnership: adding persuasion to the value proposition	Prepare a Partnership Value Proposal for your partnership with the chosen potential partner. Write out your Theory of Change for the partnership, including proposed metrics. Write out your "elevator pitch" for the partnership.
Week 4	Negotiating partnerships Preparing for partnership meetings Practicing alternatives to a negotiated agreement Recognizing when and how to say "no" Supporting the pitch with an "evidence toolkit"	Build and submit your "evidence toolkit"
Week 5	Running partnerships Informing and involving the volunteer community Planning action and sharing reality	Prepare two sample announcements for your community about this prospective partnership
Week 6	Sustainability and Evaluation Evaluating partnerships beyond the programmatic work Refining and revising partnerships Ending partnerships	Write out an evaluation plan for your proposed partnership
Week 7	Troubleshooting and dealing with setbacks recognizing setbacks in partnerships communicating problems to partners identifying common problems; planning mitigations	Prepare a contingency plan for contingencies you anticipate in your partnership
Week 8	Final projects Choosing a structure and flow for your pitch presentation Participating in ongoing learning	prepare and present your final pitch, with peer feedback

Assignment strategy

Assignments in this course focused on practicing specific skills and tasks taught and demonstrated each week. Starting with the assignments following the Week 2 lesson, all assignments were centered on a single, actual potential partner of the learner's group or affiliate, in order to both make the assignment maximally relevant to the learner's context and make its outcomes practical and useful for actual partnership-building work with that potential partner outside the course.

The course instructor provided in-depth feedback on each assignment, and learners were encouraged to resubmit amended assignments based on received feedback for re-grading when they were less than excellent. The pilot employed the “WikiLearn scale" for grading assignments, grading on a scale of four values: poor, needs improvement, good, excellent.

Most of the assignments also prepared learners for the course's Final Assignment, which was to design and deliver an actual 20-minute partnership pitch to an audience made up of the course instructor and two fellow learners, who listened and gave feedback first on behalf of the prospective partner (role-playing) and then as instructor and peers. This final pitch required incorporating multiple elements practiced separately earlier (e.g. self-presentation, partner research, value proposition, evidence toolkit, theory of change), and integrating them into a single, compelling whole.

Unlike the rest of the assignments, in which learners had the space of one week to prepare, the course took an additional two-week break before the final assignment was due, to allow learners to spend up to three weeks preparing and honing their final presentation.

Key findings

Completion and attrition

Of the 39 learners who started the course, 23 graduated with passing grades, having submitted all course assignments. About half the attrition was due to personal circumstances and/or the pandemic, and the other half was due to insufficient interest or time to engage with the course and the time required for preparing its assignments.

That latter half suggests that the clear and explicit statement of time and effort expectations, made in the course description page and at the initial on-boarding call, were insufficient to help learners make informed decisions on whether the course suits their interest and availability. The team would be grateful for feedback on how this could be achieved more effectively.

Evidence of learning and learner satisfaction

Fully 100% (n=18) of the final survey respondents agreed with the statements "I feel more confident in my ability to initiate a partnership", "I intend to apply what I learned to my Wikimedia work.", and "I have new or different ideas about how I might do my Wikimedia work in the future.". 94% (n=18) agreed with the statements "I gained practical skills relevant to my activities in the Wikimedia movement." and "I gained knowledge relevant to my activities in the Wikimedia movement.". 89% (n=18) agreed with the statement: "I better understand how to prepare for and pursue a partnership."

Furthermore, fully 100% (n=18) of the final survey respondents "found the course interesting, and 94% (n=18) agreed with the statement "I learned what I was expecting to learn". 89% (n=18) agreed with the statement "Submitting assignments and getting feedback on them provided significant value to me, beyond the frontal lesson."

Overall, 100% of final survey respondents (n=18) agreed with the statement "I am likely to recommend this course to other Wikimedians.", and 94% (n=18) agreed with the statement "I would be interested in another online course from the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Development team.".

Additional learner feedback

Here are some pieces of feedback reinforcing the course's design choices:

• "I really liked very practical examples and content from other students' homework."
• "It made my week better and I really liked the way the activities were structured. :)"
• "[I learned t]hat we are not alone, we will have support every time."
• "The presenter did a great job with his presentation skills and feedback on assignments."
• "An initiative like this is a good way to improve the skills of Wikimedia community volunteers especially by having a good mentor like Asaf, I really like the way he teaches, calm and easy going."
• "[I would be interested in another course from the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Development team] due to the quality of teaching from the instructor. It is easy to learn what he taught and apply it practically."

Here are some additional pieces of feedback, each given by one respondent, we are taking into consideration for improving future courses:

• "Two-hour lectures without breaks or changes of activity were too long"
• "[I wanted m]ore evidence for the claims about "best practice" which were made."
• "The time for the course was short, especially with the assignments."

Testimonials

Here are some messages received from course participants, with identifying details removed, that provide some specific demonstrations of impact:

1. "We are all just diving in and finding our way with the data and resources at the moment, and figuring out how we can collaborate with [...]. We will have three events around the country just like I planned for the partnership, but I realized going through your course that as a group we are not ready for a proper partnership with a big government agency yet. We have the numbers to have some impact, but as editors some of us don't know each other very well yet (we met nationally for the first time [recently]) so that presents a level of risk I wasn't very comfortable with. That was such a valuable thing to realise! And I think some smaller donation of data and images type relationships will help us develop our confidence as a group.

I have however Wikified a local book festival just last week and had a quick elevator pitch to the director, with a follow up meeting planned soon, so am happily using the knowledge I have gained from the training."

2. "Yesterday I had a meeting with the director of the National Park [...X...] and [...] we have [made] an oral partnership agreement, but we are also preparing a [memorandum] for cooperation. At the meeting, which lasted two and a half hours, we talked about education, field work, research, volunteering, adult training from the institution, camps, editorial competitions and awards... People received me very well just because I come as a Wikimedia educator and they liked my idea more than I expected. The Partnership Building course for me means: confidence, security and support in everything I do for Wikimedia. I'm happy about that!"

3. "We actually had a mission statement before, but it was focused on the generation of content. Thanks to this course I realized that our mission [statement] could be improved. I asked people at my [user group] to help me come up with a new definition. We are now redefining our mission statement to focus on people and their ability to develop new skills rather than content. We want to focus on people being able to learn the wiki way. Also, we want to work on languages other than [...X...] under free licenses using information and communication technologies."

4. "Would you mind if I did a mini-course with your material for [my language] Wikipedians who are interested in learning some partnership skills? Not a full course, just a sort of summary in [my language]."

Identifying and Addressing Harassment

Course overview and rationale

Administrators, functionaries and users with advanced rights continue to serve a critical role in the goal of becoming the essential infrastructure of the free knowledge ecosystem. In their capacities, they are routinely engaged to address online harassment on the projects. Harassment can alienate volunteers permanently from the projects and, in some cases, spill over into real life, impacting the emotional, physical and mental well-being of those experiencing it. The development of the Universal Code of Conduct is one element of building a safer movement. However, administrators who can identify and address harassment with empathy are necessary for the long-term growth of the Wikimedia movement and the well-being of volunteers.

The focus of the Identifying and Addressing Harassment course was to introduce principles to limit harm and encourage empathy in administrators when they are managing cases of harassment. Participants were introduced to the roles and impacts of harassment and how other online communities address harassment.

The course instructor and curriculum author was Simona Ramkisson, senior manager of Community Development at the Foundation.

Course Outline

The weekly session utilized a lecture and discussion model that encouraged participants to analyze and discuss concepts presented during class. To promote safety and comfort in the course, learners co-developed a community agreement or shared statement in the first session on what they would need to feel comfortable to engage with one another. Course instructors shared this community agreement at the beginning of each session as a reminder to participants.

Week	Learning objectives
Week 1	Discuss movement definitions of harassment and explore the impact on different roles/personas involved in online harassment.
Week 2	Recognize the role of implicit/unconscious bias when addressing harassment.
Week 3	Explore the fundamentals of empathetic communication when addressing “targets” of harassment, a critical need when intending to limit harm.
Week 4	Participants practiced communicating and providing feedback to actors of harassment and developing best practices to ensure personal safety.
Week 5	Participants completed a self-reflection exercise to map their current practice as administrators and determine critical areas where they could immediately begin embracing harm reduction practices.
Week 6	Participants welcomed a panel of speakers who discussed how different online communities address harassment during online moderation. Speakers were: Claudia Lo, Senior Product Researcher, Wikimedia Foundation Kat Lo, Content Moderation Lead, Meedan Nighat Dad, Executive Director, Digital Rights Foundation
Week 7	Participants began working on their end-of-course project, a plan to achieve a specific action related to reducing harm when addressing harassment on the projects in their administrator roles.
Week 8	Participants presented their final action plans to the cohort and received feedback to improve the outcomes of their plans.

Assignment Strategy

Assignments in this course focused on preparing learners for the final course project, an action plan that they could personally use when addressing harassment in their administrator roles.

Each week, participants completed assignments designed to take about 45-60 minutes to complete. Activities consisted of forum discussions, case study reviews as well as personal reflections.

The focus of assignments was to enhance concepts discussed during live sessions and not be time-intensive. Course instructors provided in-depth feedback on each activity, and participants were encouraged to resubmit assignments with integrated feedback for higher grading. The pilot employed the “WikiLearn” scale for grading assignments, ranging from poor to excellent.

Key Findings

Initially, twenty-eight administrators confirmed their interest to participate in the 8-week course but due to a number of reasons including the changing nature of the Covid-19 pandemic, our final cohort totalled twenty-one participants.

Twenty-one volunteers completed all 8 sessions in the course, with 18 action plans developed in full. These action plans represent several projects ranging from providing unconscious bias training to local communities to online tool development to address microaggressions on the projects.

Learner Satisfaction and Evidence of Learning

Respondents (n=14) to the final survey indicated:

• 100% (n=14) of confidence in their ability to now support targets of harassment in a way that encourages empathy, with 93% (n=14) stating that they felt like they could directly address harassment on the projects to reduce harm to targets of harassment.
• 93% (n=14)of respondents indicated that they gained relevant skills, and the same number stated that they intended to apply what they learned in the course to their Wikimedia work moving forward.The same number would also recommend this course to other Wikimedians.
• 86% (n=14) of respondents indicated that they had “new or different ideas about how they may approach their Wikimedia work in the future.
• 71% (n=14) of respondents felt they developed new connections with other volunteers through the course and expressed interest in continuing with those connections by developing a community of practices.

Additional learner feedback

Here are some pieces of feedback reinforcing the course's design choices:

• "This was a very interesting course with many great points raised!"
• "Thank you for organizing this course for us and for doing it on Saturdays, a day which is more convenient for volunteers! I enjoyed the course and learned a lot. Maybe there will be an “advanced course” at some point"
• "The feedback on my action plan helped me so much”
• "This was a really enjoyable and useful experience"
• ”It was quite well-organized but it would be great to have a wiki page where we could interact and provide ongoing feedback”

Testimonials

• “I thought this was an excellent idea and I hope the Community Development team proceeds in the same direction”
• ”I learned many things, that I believe I should spread to other volunteers who might be vulnerable or confused on what to do in cases of harassment”
• ”The Wikilearn proved to be an incredibly useful exercise in perspective-taking. It helped me to better understand the limitations of our on-wiki systems and how they can exclude certain viewpoints from the projects. This is a critical time for our projects as they come under attack from organized campaigns intending to skew our content which challenges our claims to a neutral point of view. If harassment is unchecked and causes contributors to leave the projects, our adherence to founding principles and five pillars are at risk. While as an administrator, one adopts the "thick skin" required to remain in stressful situations, there are many contributors that find hostile environments to be exclusionary. It is not only the people in an acrimonious dispute that are affected by it, but also the audience that sees how contributors are treating each other. It is from seeing how the communities respond to harassment that will inform their view of the community, and their choice to participate. The course also helped me better recognize my own capacity for responding to events and reminded me to consider whether I had the "personal bandwidth" to engage responsibly with any given encounter and see it to conclusion. The collaboration and learnings from other Wikimedians from other projects were invaluable, and the connections that were made there are long-lasting. I have already been able to apply the learnings to better guide my interactions on the projects as an administrator to encourage others to start taking a more active role in modelling appropriate behaviour”
• A participant from the “Identifying and Addressing Harassment” course began sharing a summary of each weekly live session in French. The motivation for the summary was interest from other French-speaking volunteers who were also interested in addressing harassment that encourages harm reduction.

Platform, Learning Environment and Accessibility

Platform, Environment and Accessibility

The platform chosen for the pilot, the free-software Moodle hosted on the commercial official Moodle partner Moodle Cloud allowed us to run a successful pilot, but turned out to have several significant shortcomings, that made us want to find a better solution (see Next Steps below). The core functions of Moodle worked well enough -- in particular, written assignments, discussion forums, user-to-user messaging, and OAuth authentication all worked smoothly.

The main shortcomings were:

• Poor support for multilingual content as expected by Wikimedians (including maintenance features etc.)
• inflexible support for peer-assessment assignments (the Moodle "Workshop" activity)
• poor integration with free-software BigBlueButton video-conferencing solution, preventing downloads.
• poor responsiveness from Moodle Cloud's support team, and uninformed and unhelpful responses when those finally arrived.

The lack of support for participants to download recordings of lessons was especially impactful for our courses' accessibility -- some of the learners had poor Internet connections, making live participation in video calls impossible, but they could have (very slowly) downloaded the recorded video of the lesson, had those recordings been made downloadable by the platform (as distinct from only streamable).

Below are the survey results from participants of the two courses.

Scheduling

The WikiLearn pilot implemented participatory scheduling for the weekly live session. Participants accepted into the final cohort during the application process indicated their preferred days and times for the 2-hour weekly session. The team reviewed all dates and times convenient to participants and scheduled the session that would ensure that no volunteer would need to join the session at an inconvenient time. Participants who found the day and time of the weekly session to be a challenge could access video recordings of weekly sessions and schedule 1:1 time with course instructors during weekly office hours.

In the final survey, on average, 97% of survey respondents indicated it was important that the course was accessible to their time zone.

Next Steps

Online learning has been a growing need in the Wikimedia movement for some time. This need has been evident even before the COVID-19 pandemic impacted in-person meeting, and will remain a need after the pandemic subsides and in-person gatherings resume.

Online learning is and will remain the only form of learning available to large parts of Wikimedia's volunteer communities. As such, it is a strategic need of the movement, and should be resourced appropriately. This report is one piece of evidence to support such a resourcing decision.

In the first half of the 2021-2022 Foundation fiscal year, the Community Development team has been working on preparing a mature, operational, learning platform. Based on the pilot experience, and after also considering a number of proprietary platforms, the team decided to switch to the Open edX platform, which is free software licensed under the GNU Affero Public License 3.0, and has a more modern technical implementation, that's easier to do custom development on and to innovate in.

The Wikimedia Foundation is not ready to host this platform in-house on the production environment, and its Wikimedia Cloud's implementation of Openstack is incomplete, so for now, WikiLearn is to be hosted externally on Amazon Web Services, with managed hosting as well as custom development provided by the vendor Edly. For more information about Edly's handling of data on the platform, please refer to their privacy policy, which has been reviewed by the Foundation's Legal team. For more information about our privacy practices, please refer to our non-wiki privacy policy.

All custom-developed code is released under the AGPL as well, and is available in a GitHub repository under the Wikimedia account. This multi-year project intends to provide a variety of live and self-guided capacity-building courses in several languages.

The Community Development team is modifying both pilot courses into self-guided online courses for self-study, and expects to launch them for free public enrollment by April 2022. The online learning platform will be home to the updated self-guided courses, ported over from Moodle. Courses will be made available in their original English, and translation of the content into different languages will be encouraged. The team will provide technical support for groups interested in making one of these courses available in another language using the WikiLearn platform.

By late 2022, we expect to be offering additional courses from other curriculum authors within the movement (other Wikimedia teams, Wikimedia affiliates). Some courses will be in languages other than English.

The Community Development team will also be discussing a learning strategy that will support trainers and facilitators in the movement interested in providing guided/live courses that would focus on skill development and network building.

If you have any questions about our team’s online learning work, please see the team page on Meta or contact comdevteam@wikimedia.org.