On 30 July 2020 at 10:47 Grounder UK <grounderuk@gmail.com> wrote:

Did you have any questions, Charles? I'm not seeing any.

Ah. According to https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/abstract-wikipedia/2020-July/000223.html there may have been some glitch.

Resending.

Charles

/starts

I have been interested in edtech since 2012, when I did some work on Moodle for Wikimedia UK. The AW project has, for me, an obvious place for some educational development, and I'm dropping in the main lines of my thinking with this posting.

Firstly, it is a standard form of educational material to supply some material to read, or watch, and then some questions to answer. That can either be as a test, or as knowledge review/self-test. If AW is going to supply base code for articles - or let's say an article section - then questions could be appended in related code, and rendered together with it. For example the cloze (missing word) type of test would seem relatively easy to implement.

Granted that this sort of application of AW, in fully multilingual form, is not so hard to envisage, what needs to be said at the current stage of prototyping? A few points:

(1) There is actually no de facto standard for multiple choice questions. AW could address this gap in the market.

(2) My experience with Moodle (which is a long story) suggests to me the basic architectural point that a question database should be the hub of an edtech system.

(3) Instructional design, which is a bit more than just having an edtech content management system, is not so hard to enable. The function wiki could enable it without a big stretch, I'd think.

I don't want to write a manifesto here, just yet. On point (1) there is Moodle XML, but it is clearly too rigid and limited. Magnus Manske at http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=446 has shown what Wikibase can do in this area, with a tool Comprende! - the overlap with the subject of this posting is no coincidence.

/ends