Such a noticeboard would be great, if made easy for community members to
find! It'd mean centralization of everything from a single problem student
through to an ambassador going on wikibreak whose courses need extra eyes,
and that's a good thing in my book.

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 3:40 PM, Frank Schulenburg <
[email protected]> wrote:

> Derrick & all,
>
> Another thought: how do we want to handle issues where some part of the
> program (be it an entire course or a Campus/Online Ambassador) is having
> problems? Let's face it – not every student will contribute the same
> quality content. Although we know through surveys that many of them are
> highly motivated and have a lot of respect when it comes to see their own
> words appear on a medium that they're using almost daily, some of them will
> still underperform. And also the other way round: not every Campus/Online
> Ambassador is on the same level or has enough time to support the students
> as needed.
>
> So, getting back to Sonia's case: how can we make sure that we handle
> issues effectively? Would it be beneficial to create a page (e.g.
> "Wikipedia:Education program noticeboard") where both community members and
> instructors could flag issues? I guess it would be a good first step _to be
> aware_ of issues like the one that Sonia is referring to.
>
> Part of what Rob Schnautz is doing as a contractor is to look into the
> students' contributions (by taking reasonable samples) and to flag issues
> to other members of my team. How about if we did this in a more
> collaborative way and started a page like the one I suggested above?
>
> Would that be more effective?
>
> Frank
>
> Am 16.04.2012 um 20:05 schrieb Frank Schulenburg:
>
> Agreed. I think it's a great idea to have a kind of "checkpoint" review
> earlier in the semester. Did you know that Pharos started an 'Educational
> peer review' process recently?
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Educational_peer_review_requests
>
> I really like the idea and it could be a significant improvement when it
> comes to giving the students feedback. I would be more than happy if this
> kind of initiative was successful.
>
> Thanks a lot for your thoughts, Derrick!
>
> Frank
>
> Am 16.04.2012 um 19:27 schrieb Derrick Coetzee:
>
> My thoughts:
>
> Even with the very best student groups I've seen, it was absolutely
> necessary to review their work periodically. These days I use my Followed
> users tools to facilitate this.
>
> http://toolserver.org/~dcoetzee/followedusers/
>
> I absolutely agree that it should be *mandatory* to have an experienced
> Wikipedian review each contribution before it goes live in mainspace, or
> else you can end up with a lot of people panicking to clean up
> contributions that were not ready for deployment. This is feasible because
> of the program requirement that there are a limited number of students per
> CA/OA, and contributes directly to student learning and to the project.
>
> Moreover, I think it's very important to have at least one less thorough
> "checkpoint" review earlier in the semester, where the student's initial
> draft is reviewed for any problems. Students are deploying very late in the
> term, and if they have serious issues such as copyright violations it may
> be too late to do much about them.
>
> Finally, I think it's vital that ambassadors examine the topic choices of
> the students as soon as they're made, and make sure they're suitable for
> articles.
>
> I don't believe Sonia's experience with her class is representative (that
> particular faculty member has a history of issues), but I do think that
> certain measures are good for every student int he program.
>
> --
> Derrick Coetzee
> User:Dcoetzee
>
> On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 4:45 PM, Sonia Newton-Shostakovich <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Seconding Guerillero, with a little added thought:
>>
>> Some, okay, a *lot* of the edits students have made have been frankly
>> terrible. Many classes do not have ambassadors actively supervising them,
>> and are putting out edits that are more harmful than helpful to the project
>> and don't get fixed (and personally, I've been involved with a class just
>> as "on call for questions"; just reviewed their work recently and was
>> kicking myself for not having the foresight to monitor them regardless of
>> my explicit role. Yay cleanup!) We don't have enough active ambassadors to
>> follow each student around, nor is there infrastructure in place to make
>> sure each class has some oversight of that sort.
>>
>> It's a dual-fold problem: firstly, as an Articles for Creation reviewer,
>> I'm sometimes coming across students who are obviously part of classes but
>> who have not made any edits which would allow me to find their course page,
>> and whose instructions have clearly been dismal; secondly, as an
>> ambassador, I'm sometimes overwhelmed when looking at just a couple of
>> courses and trying to make a student's contributions conform to our
>> standards without destroying their morale and/or grade. A lot of this could
>> be prevented on the campus side of things: *before *the in-hindsight
>> cleaning up, instructions for students should be sufficient and accurate,
>> and supervision by experienced Wikipedians made *compulsory*. Too many
>> terrible paragraphs will fall through the gaps otherwise.
>>
>> The more work I see from this project the more I'm inclined to agree with
>> Piotr that profs who haven't ever done tasks similar to that they set for
>> their students should not be setting those tasks.
>>
>> Sonia
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Guerillero Wikipedia <
>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> That is the issue world wide. Here are some of the issues that I see.
>>>
>>> (a) We need to have the guts to say no sometimes. At least in the
>>> states, I feel that we would get better results if we tried to get more
>>> small liberal arts schools who have class sizes that range from 10-30. One
>>> hundred plus person classes do not work well with our model.
>>>
>>> (b) We need to shoot for upper level classes. PSY 100 or ENG 101 should
>>> not be our target class. The students do not know yet how to write
>>> effectively in their subject area, for the most part, and have yet to do
>>> real research. 200 or 300 level classes would be easier to work with.
>>>
>>> These two things cut down on the number of volunteers. Who wants to work
>>> with 100 freshman who do not comunicate with you no matter how hard you try
>>> and who have yet to learn how to produce a workable product.
>>>
>>> --Guerillero
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 7:21 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga <
>>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Interesting thread!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#The_future_of_our_program
>>>>
>>>> This is the main challenge in my opinion for the second semester for
>>>> WEP in Brazil, multiply the number of ambassadors -  there is some
>>>> progress here in the pilot. To convince professors on the importance
>>>> and need of this program after showing successful cases seems easier
>>>> than to have enough campus ambassadors for the demand. A key step of
>>>> the project when we are thinking about expanding in any place.
>>>>
>>>> Tom
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
>>>> Wikimedia Brasil
>>>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Education mailing list
>>>> [email protected]
>>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
>>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>
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