Welcome to the Wikipedia Education Update — a newsletter from the Wikimedia Foundation that is distributed the first and third Tuesday of each month. Someone from our staff has talked with you about our Wikipedia Education Program to bring Wikipedia into higher education classrooms around the world, and we wanted to keep you in the loop on all of our exciting activities. If you would prefer not to receive these messages, simply reply to the email and ask for your address to be removed. Learn more about subscribing or read the archives.

Why student learning matters, too
Jami Mathewson, the program manager for the United States and Canada versions of the Wikipedia Education Program, authored an op-ed post for the Wikimedia blog about why student learning matters. In Jami's post, she argues that the benefits of doing Wikipedia assignments are more than just improving Wikipedia articles. Students gain real-world skills they would not achieve through a more traditional assignment. Read Jami's op-ed.

Next term kicks off in Arab World
Also on the Wikimedia blog, Tighe Flanagan, the program manager for the Arab World version of the Wikipedia Education Program, writes about the plans for the next term. Tighe provides a report on the recent Arab World meeting and Jordan celebration conference in Amman, Jordan, as well as talking about the momentum for the program, which is carrying the efforts forward this term in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Learn more about the Arab World program by reading Tighe's post.

Students successfully complete online training
One year ago, students in the United States and Canada program started using a new resource: an online training designed to teach them the basics of contributing to Wikipedia. After two terms of listening to student feedback and making minor adjustments to the training content, the training has taken off. Already, more than 300 students have successfully completed the online training this term, and more and more professors are assigning their students the training as part of their coursework. See the training.

WikiSkills program helps teachers in Sweden
One facet of the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning Programme is called WikiSkills, and Wikimedia Sverige has been running a WikiSkills program to instruct teachers on using collaborative tools like wikis in their teaching. Sten Sundin, a teacher at Dalarna University, says he learned about discussion pages and wikimarkup from attending the WikiSkills classes, and he looks forward to incorporating Wikimedia project contributions in his sound and music production classes. Read more about the program.