I'm writing to share an update on the way forward as far as making sure that we adequately capture all the learnings possible from the India Education Program. We also want to make sure that these learnings are robust and are incorporated into the core program design going forward. We also would like these learnings to also be of an adequately granular level so that we can identify trends of what doesn't work and what might work better - such as year of students, nature of faculty involvement, subject area, etc.
We are planning multiple channels to capture, analyse and incorporate these learnings.
- WMF has commissioned a researcher, Tory Read, to conduct an evaluative study of the IEP and provide recommendations for improvement. Over the course of next few days, she will be interviewing several teachers, students, CAs, Directors, admins and other wikipedia editors from the global community to take their input and views about IEP. She has already spoken to staff in SF, spent the day with us in Delhi and will be in Pune over the next 4 days conducting face-to-face interviews. She will also be reaching out to community members outside of Pune. She will then write an evaluative story about what worked, what did not and learnings from the the pilot.
- A series of video interviews were done by a Campus Ambassador in Pune - Abhishek Suryawanshi who conducted interviews with students, professors and Campus Ambassadors in Pune. We promised all interviewees that any personal identifying information would be removed from this analysis to encourage them to speak freely.
- In addition, India Programs consultants (Hisham & I) and Wikimedia Foundation staff (Frank Schulenburg and LiAnna Davis) are interviewing experienced Wikipedia editors from India and across the world. Please do reply offlist if any one of us can contact you to ask your views (if we already have not.)
- We want to collate data points to be able to analyze and draw out trends. Here is an example of data that we're trying to dig out (and this is just a sub-set of a preliminary list)
- What's the amount of data that students have added to Wikipedia? What's the amount of data that got reverted? What's the net amount of information that the students have added on Wikipedia?
- How many students edited articles outside of their in-class assignments?
- How many student's got warnings on their talk pages? How many students corrected their errors after these warnings?
- How many students got blocked? / How many students got blocked more than once?
- At the WikiConference India we also had a IEP round table where we invited a couple of students, professors and campus ambassadors to share their personal views and experience working with IEP pilot. I'm going to upload the video if it's possible and share this with you. It was a very useful session where we discussed many of the points that will inform our future work - such as determining whether it should be voluntary or not, what student's were thinking while they engaged in copy-pasting into their articles, improvements to Campus Ambassador training, ideas on what kind of professors can work best on a project of this nature, etc.
- The Learnings Page is my *very* preliminary draft at collating learnings from the pilot and exploring how how we can incorporate these in our way forward.
We will shortly summaries of all these findings as and when they are ready - and welcome an open discussion on them.
Do please share your thoughts and suggestions on the above. Please also do let me know if I've missed out anything.
Thanks
Nitika