[Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail

[Hisham]

Our mails coincided, Srikanth, but my comments inline.

hisham

On Nov 12, 2011, at 6:10 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> If you are not aware of it yet, India Education Program Pilot died around a week back[1] and a post mortem was done on Signpost[2]. I wonder if we Indians like to only rejoice success's and keep silence when we fail. One could have acknowledged the death on this list. It didnt happen. Bad.

That's not accurate.  The dates are as follows:  It was concluded in all but 1 class of Symbiosis School of Economics a few weeks ago (because the assignements were concluded.)  It continues in 1 class at this college and at 1 class at the SNDT Women's University.  We asked College of Engineering Pune to stop the program in their classrooms last week.  It is still being continued at this college by 1 professor nevertheless.

> 
> I am sad, guilty, angry all at the same time. I could not give more time for being an "Online Ambassador". I thought role of an OA would be to help out people who are reaching out for help, only to understand later OA needs to look what people are doing edit by edit, reach out to them and help them. That is a lesson learnt for me. The program has taught us many different lessons for each of us but are we too fast in race to pause for a moment and analyze? Plans for next rollout is already ON[3], without doing enough justice to large post-mortem. Am disappointed.

There is going to be a through analysis of this pilot. The links you are referring are not plans for a rollout; they are just an invite to see if any existing community members in other cities could invest the kind of time (during work hours and in classrooms) that Campus Ambassadors need to do.
> 
> While large section of post mortem completely ignored one basic premise. "Quality of Indian Students & Faculty". If you dont select only the interested / qualified ones, we will fail again miserably, no matter how many ambassadors are there. Probably the students in the program must be selected how ambassadors were selected in Pune and then try the pilot with 20-30 *interested* students/faculty instead of heading to a college, pushing through top management of College and making a failure out of IEP. Another thing with colleges are "If you can't do in odd semester, you can't do it in even semester". So I would suggest some detailed analysis before launching any further programs.  

At none of the colleges did we push this through the top management.  

Having said that we should have looked at much lower student numbers.

I didn't get the comment on even and odd semesters

> I find a lot more can be done to this "Findings and Learnings"[4].

Please do share your additional points.  As I mentioned, it's very much work in progress.
>   
> 
> It is good to have CAs who have reasonable experience in editing wikipedia.

Fully agree.  Having said that, given the relatively small community size in India, and the amount of face-to-face class time that Campus Ambassadors need to put in, there will be a number of CAs who will be newbies.  We must however amend our selection and training criteria for them going forward.

> Its MUST, not good to have. Infact this factor made some OA, CA's from PPI feel bad on why they are ambassadors.

> 
>  I personally don't believe that Indian culture had much bearing on this pilot. Some students in India – as elsewhere – are either lazy and plagiarize or they genuinely believe that close paraphrasing means something is no longer plagiarized.
> 
> Please get to close to reality Hisham,

As i mentioned in my mail, we are going to do am objective review of this and this will inform the way forward.

> Many of us went through college recently know its not *Some*, its *Most*. Anything called assignment and graded will be copy-pasted even by the brightest 5% of students in class who would have potential to do on their own. If IEP continues to do "Marks for Wikipedia editing" campaign, we will fail again, only consolation next time might be it would be easy to clean up since we would be cautious with numbers. Also certain level of competence is required for article creation (or even basic editing for that matter), I think we need to acknowledge it and shouldnt just be going around with the notion "Everyone can edit" simply without adding a pinch of Salt. WP:COMPETENCE[5] is not about subject matter expertise, its about Competence required for Wikipedia editing, many of which cannot be practically expected from all Indian students / Faculty. 
> 
There are many learnings and we will take all of them on board.

> 
> [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program#Meeting_with_the_Director_of_College_of_Engineering.2C_Pune
> [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-11-07/Special_report
> [3] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-in-blr/2011-November/000545.html
> [4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Education_Program
> [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COMPETENCE
> -- 
> Regards
> Srikanth.L
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