IMPORTANT NOTE: The Wikipedia community has decided to black out the English Wikipedia globally for 24 hours on January 18 in protest of SOPA and PIPA. During this time, the English Wikipedia will be unavailable. Learn more.

Welcome to the Global 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 Global 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.

Professor blogs about teaching experiences in Brazil
Juliana Bastos Marques a professor at UNIRIO, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State in Brazil, wrote a post for the Wikimedia Foundation blog highlighting her experiences using Wikipedia as a teaching tool in her course last term. Her students worked to improve the Portuguese Wikipedia's coverage of Roman history, with help from a Campus Ambassador and two Online Ambassadors, all volunteers from the Portuguese Wikipedia community. Learn more about what Juliana learned by reading her blog post.

Cairo Pilot project plan now available
The Wikipedia Education Program is launching a small pilot in Cairo, Egypt, this term, and the details of the program plan are now available on the Outreach Wiki. The Cairo Pilot will take place at two universities, Cairo University and Ain Shams University, and a maximum of 90 students across 6-7 courses will be contributing content to the Arabic Wikipedia. Some students will be writing original content, and others will be translating existing articles from the French and Spanish Wikipedias to the Arabic Wikipedia. For more information, read the Cairo Pilot program plan.

U.S. digital media class covered on WMF blog
College of Staten Island professor Michael Mandiberg participated in the U.S. Education Program in the fall term, wherein he asked his students to improve the content of Wikipedia in the design discipline, including giving students extra credit for getting a contemporary designer to release an image of themselves or their work under a free license on Wikimedia Commons. Michael's course also had a unique opportunity to work with the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to write articles on an exhibit that opened during their term. Learn more about Michael's experiences by reading the blog post.

Participation Requirements for spring announced
Professors joining the Wikipedia Education Program in the spring 2012 term are finding a new set of participation requirements in place, designed to ensure that all participating professors and students receive adequate support on Wikipedia. While the work of the fall term produced a lot of incredible content, many students lacked the support they needed from volunteer Ambassadors, so the Participation Requirements in part commit the Foundation to ensuring there will be one Wikipedia Ambassador for each 15 students in the course. For more information, see the requirements page on the Outreach Wiki.