I'd like to respond to a few of specific points here.
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 9:24 PM, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
Now I am a huge supporter of encouraging students to edit Wikipedia. However last fall I can across a psychology class of 1500 first year students contributing content to psychology articles. There was four ambassadors / teaching assistants. Two of these never made a single edit to Wikipedia and the other two had only made a handful. The prof of this class never made a main space edit.
James, as you are well aware, we have worked very hard to address the problems raised by this course last fall. We created the new Participation Requirements [1] in part because of the valid objections you and others raised about the fall term. But one thing I'd like to point out here is that while there were 1,500 students in the course, only 318 of them participated in the Wikipedia portion of the course. You're absolutely right that four Ambassadors were not enough to support 318 students (hence our new Ambassador:student ratio in [1]), but please don't exaggerate the problem by claiming we had 1,500 students being supported by four Ambassadors.
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 10:04 PM, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote: I think one could be done with a bootcamp for
professors before they design their class syllabus and where professors are given suggested lesson plans for how to use WMF projects in the classroom in order to meet learn objectives in the class.
Please note that according to [1] referenced above, all professors participating in the U.S. and Canada programs are required to do an orientation where they learn exactly what you're suggesting, as well as some Wikipedia basics. We've also conducted in-person faculty workshops at our pilots in Egypt and Brazil to cover similar material.
On the issue of teaching assistants, I think this is extremely important: We need to do away with the campus ambassador programme. It needs to be replaced with a Teaching Assistant/Graduate Assistant process.
I'm sorry you feel that Campus Ambassadors aren't useful, but the data we have from our student surveys (which will be released in a WMF blog post later this week) indicate that students overwhelmingly find the Ambassador support incredibly helpful. According to the survey data, 92.8% of students who worked with Campus Ambassadors found them to be useful.
Let me point out as well that some of our Campus Ambassadors are TAs or GAs for that professor (we ask the professor if they have someone they'd like to have us train as a CA, and a TA or GA is a logical choice). Replacing the CA program as you propose also eliminates all professors who do not have a TA or GA, and as we have seen from survey data, having that presence on campus is incredibly important for students' success.
LiAnna
[1] http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program/Participation...