I'd also direct you to this page on Outreach wiki, where the Global
Education Program lives. It links to the various online trainings available
to help onboard you and your students.
https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Trainings

Thanks. The trainings page will be very useful, both for the teachers and the students of the course. 

On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 3:51 PM, Kleefeld, John <john.kleefeld@usask.ca> wrote:
Jirka, you may want to consider having your students review each other’s work. This might take some of the load off of you and enhance the students’ learning experience. Or you can make even more work for yourself by also grading them on their peer reviews.  :-)

I'll keep this in mind.

 On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 6:26 PM, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,

Is there a specific reason why your students are supposed to translate
from the native language to English, and not the other way round?

It was just the first idea that occurred to me and I did not have a specific reason in mind. If I have to come up with one post hoc, I'd say that students in the course do not share a common native tongue. They mostly speak Czech or Slovak, but there is a sizable minority of Erasmus students and such like. Having them translate into their native tongue means I may need to work with multiple Wikipedia language mutations, not just one. And with languages I do not understand myself.

Writing for English Wikipedia is very difficult even to English
speaking students. If the text quality of the contributions is (too)
low,

Leigh Thelmadatter already persuaded me it was a bad idea.
 
A text must be curated afterwards. At least for
a couple of days, the students should be online and accept feedback in
order to improve the texts. This time must be planned in your
schedule.

A very good point. I see (now) I must tell this to the students. Otherwise I might end up polishing their work for them, or deleting it altogether.
 
I hope this does not sound too pessimistic. :-) Also, I would advise
to consider to let students something else do that "writing an
article". I think that that is something a beginner should not start
with.

Any suggestions, anyone? I need to come up with an activity that produces some "deliverable artifact". (If it comes to it, the deliverable might be just a short writeup about what they were working on...) Then again, I am not sure language learners can do a lot to improve English Wikipedia, for reasons you said yourself. And I probably cannot assign them some menial clerical tasks...
 
If someone is interested, I could report about experiences with regard
to German students translating from English.

I would like to know how much support the students need, both in learning their way around WIkipedia and then during the translation itself. What I am dealing with is an e-learning course without any face-to-face class time whatsoever. My current idea is to have students go through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Training/For_students (and giving them a quiz for points after each module, to keep them motivated) and explain any questions they have afterwards in an online discussion. From your experience, would it be enough?