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

[Srikanth Lakshmanan]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 18:56, Hisham <hmundol at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> 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.
>

Probably the same could have been highlighted enough at Signpost. The
signpost heading conveys its closed down.

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.
>

Thanks for clarifying, helps much.


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

Well I cant help point CoEP where the director was much excited about the
program and without his push directly / indirectly, I wonder if 800+
students would have voluntarily signed up. I will never agree if anyone
says 800+ students voluntarily asked/agreed for Wikipedia assignments
without staff / whoever else asking them to do so.


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

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

Well it was my suggestion/opinion if you are planning next roll out in Jan.
Odd semesters in Indian colleges are longer ones July- Dec typically and
give time for students / staff to do extra things. Even semesters are
shorter Jan-May (April in many cases) so the duration for anything in
colleges are limited in even sem. This is the reason why you will find most
extra-curriculars happening in odd-sem. I am not sure if we did a time
audit of the pilot, but it took very late to have students start editing
and they were stopped almost in 2-3 weeks. We may not have that much time
to engage with students / faculty on even semesters.


>  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.
>

I would say make CAs as wikipedians with atleast 500+ edits on en.wiki to
give them a flavor of complexities in enwiki before they help out others.
In other words, start early on CA's get more commitment early on, that
before they go ahead and preach("teach") they practice("edit") enough.


-- 
Regards
Srikanth.L
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