Hello all, 

The Community Development team at the Wikimedia Foundation is launching the WikiLearn (Online Learning Pilot), a capacity-building project. This project will deliver two courses over an 8-week period that will begin on February 1, 2021. Courses are free to take part in and will be hosted on Moodle. During this pilot project, each course will be taught, and assignments are to be prepared, in English. At the end of the pilot, we will be making course materials available for anyone interested in self-study, and for translation.

The two courses we will be launching on February 1, 2021, are:

1. Identifying and Addressing Harassment: This course will focus on developing skills that will help volunteers respond to on- and off-wiki harassment.

• This course will combine scheduled sessions and independent study. The weekly commitment of this course is 2-3 hours per week. 

• Target Audience: Volunteers with administrator or other advanced user rights. 

2. Partnership Building: This intensive course will provide an in-depth curriculum on how to develop meaningful programmatic and organizational partnerships within the movement and with external partners. 

• This course will consist of scheduled sessions and individual assignments with a weekly total commitment of up to 6 hours. 

• Target Audience: Volunteers with intermediate-level experience contributing to Wikimedia projects and beginner-level experience with building partners with Non-Wikimedia groups and organizations. 

To ensure our small team can provide each learner individual support, we are limiting each course in this pilot to 40 participants. We ask that all interested applicants commit to attending weekly for the full course. 

All efforts will be made to ensure that scheduled sessions are time-zone friendly to the greatest number of enrolled participants. However, with the wide distribution of volunteers, that may not always be possible. 

Key Dates:

• Applications open Today (December 15, 2020) and will close on January 1, 2021. 

• Successful applicants will be notified on January 18, 2021.

• The first session for each course will be held on February 1, 2021. 

To Take Part in the Online Learning Pilot:  

To participate in the Partnership Building online course, fill out this application form.

To participate in the  Identifying and Addressing Harassment Online course, fill out this application form.

For more details on the Online Learning Pilot, please see our Meta page. Feel free to ask questions on the project Talk page or contact us at comdev@wikimedia.org. 

Best,

The Community Development Team