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.

Students benefit, survey results show
Students at universities in the United States and Canada found that contributing to Wikipedia as a class assignment through the Wikipedia Education Program improved their media literacy and technology skills, according to survey results from the fall 2011 term. About two-thirds of the respondents agreed that doing a Wikipedia assignment was a beneficial experience, with almost 20 percent of them strongly in favor of a Wikipedia assignment in place of a traditional term paper. See more of the survey results.

Canadian class adds two Good Articles
University of Alberta - Augustana Psychology Professor Paula Marentette asked her students to expand two articles on course-related topics this year for her Language Acquisition class. The result? The seven students in her class worked together to get two articles, vocabulary development and joint attention, to Good Article status on the English Wikipedia. In a blog post published on the Wikimedia Foundation blog, the students describe their reaction to the assignment, and Dr. Marentette describes the learning outcomes for her students. Read the post.

Cairo Pilot student writes French election article
A student in Professor Hoda Abaza's French class at Ain Shams University, one of the courses participating in the Cairo Pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program, has created an article on the French presidential elections in 2012 from scratch. The student's work is part of an extracurricular assignment, and the article has attracted attention and praise from editors in the Arabic Wikipedia community. The page received more than 2,000 hits, most of them on the day of the election last week. See the article.

Brazil Pilot students start editing in sandboxes
Five courses at two universities in Brazil are participating in a pilot this year, and students have already started editing in their sandboxes for some classes, including an electromagnetism class taught by Professor Edivaldo Santos. Professor Santos chose 14 articles for students to improve on the Portuguese Wikipedia, and already, students have started making edits to the articles in sandboxes, such as the Helmholtz Theorem. See a full report on the current status of the Brazil pilot for more information.