Wikipedia:Course pages

Course pages were administration pages in the Education Program namespace that were intended to coordinate and monitor the editing activity of student assignments. It was usually best to develop articles on the students' user pages, or as drafts. After evaluation, the articles could have gone on to become Wikipedia articles.

Background

Course pages were intended to help the Wikipedia community identify the instructor, students, volunteer(s), and Wikipedia Content Expert for articles that were to be edited, and student drafts. Details on the assignment and how it would be graded were also valuable. Course pages allowed editors to discriminate between editor-specific and classroom-specific issues, so that constructive feedback could be targeted at the right place.

Education Program course pages

See also: Help:Education Program extension

A course page that used the Education Program namespace was a structured page that organized information related to a course.

Structured course pages showed:

• Course name
• Term
• Start and end dates
• Number of students
• Whether the course was in session
• Description of the course (often including a syllabus)
• Instructors
• Volunteers
• Students
• Articles the students were working on

Wikipedia administrators, as well as users in the usergroups (Course coordinator, Course campus volunteer, Course online volunteer, and Course instructor) could create, edit, or delete a course page. Any user could enroll as a student using an "Enroll" tab at the top of the course page. To prevent non-students from enrolling on a course page, an enrollment token could be set that had to be entered upon enrollment. Any user could sign up to review a student's work by clicking "Become a reviewer" next to the article in the list, and a reviewer could opt out at any time.

Courses that were created by the Assignment Design Wizard (ADW) would have course information generated through the ADW interface. The resulting course page would display this information alongside a weekly schedule of course activities.

Course page banners

Each course page included a banner. This banner was divided as follows:

• This Course
  • Dashboard: Links to a dashboard that displayed up-to-date information on student contributions to Wikipedia from that course.
    • Note: This was only available for courses on-boarded through the Wiki Education Foundation.
  • Enroll: Allowed students or volunteers to enroll on the course page.
  • Activity feed: Showed student editors' contributions to articles, and talk pages, user pages, etc.
  • Discussion: Links to the talk page for the course.

• Wikipedia Resources
  • Interactive training: Links to the recommended, interactive student training for using Wikipedia.
  • Editing guidelines: A direct link to the pdf version of the Editing Wikipedia brochure, which included information students need to begin editing Wikipedia.
  • Help pages: A direct link to many pdfs (were also available as print handouts) which could help student editors with various tasks, including:
    • Using talk pages
    • Choosing articles
    • Citing sources
    • Avoiding plagiarism
    • Moving out of your sandbox
    • Polishing Wikipedia articles
    • "Did You Know" submissions
  • More Resources: Contained links to an up-to-date list of approved resources for student editors on Wikipedia.

• Medical and Psychology courses
  • Courses working with health or medicine related content would see an additional link directing them to resources specific to those topic areas. These resources offered specialized advice on sourcing requirements, citations, and other concerns.

• Connect
  • Other courses: Displayed a list of all courses using course pages.
  • Contact information for Wiki Edition

Education Program institution pages

An Institution page in the "Education Program" namespace showed courses offered at a specific learning institution.

An institution page showed:

• Institution name
• Location
• All Wikipedia Education Program courses (past, present, and planned) at that institution

Creating an Education Program course page

To set up an Education Program course page, you needed to have a user account on Wikipedia that had the rights to do so (either admin rights, or any of the "course" rights). You could request this on the education noticeboard.

Related special pages

The course pages extension included a number of special pages for displaying the users, pages, and activity associated with courses: Special:SpecialPages#Education.

Special:MyCourses

This page displayed activity feeds for all active courses a user was associated with (whether as student, instructor, or online or campus volunteer), such as when students made edits to their articles or created their user pages.

Special:ManageCourses

This page let users see which courses they were enrolled in as students or as instructors or online or campus volunteers for. Students could add articles they were working on through this page. Instructors could see the student tables from multiple courses at once on this page.

Special:Courses

This page listed all the courses in the system, and allowed users with the right to do so to add new courses. By default it showed only current courses, but the list of courses could be filtered to show all courses, or courses by term and/or institution and/or status (Current/Passed/Planned).

Users with the right to do so could also delete multiple courses at once through this page.

Special:Institutions

This page listed all the institutions in the system, and allowed users with the right to do so to add new institutions. By default it showed all institutions, but the list could be filtered to show only those with active courses and/or only institutions in a specific country.

Special:Students

This page listed all students enrolled in course pages, and which current courses (if any) they were enrolled in.

Special:StudentActivity

This page indicated the overall activity level of students across all courses, and listed recent editing activity from students.

Special:OnlineAmbassadors

This page listed the profiles of all online volunteers in the system.

Special:OnlineAmbassadorProfile

This page allowed a user in the online volunteer user group to create an associated profile with a short biography (entered as wiki text) and the file name of a profile photo.

Special:CampusAmbassadors

This page listed the profiles of all campus volunteers in the system.

Special:CampusAmbassadorProfile

This page allowed a user in the campus volunteer user group to create an associated profile with a short biography (entered as wiki text) and the file name of a profile photo.

Interface messages

MediaWiki:Course description

The contents of this page got preloaded in the page text field when a new course was being created. Institution specific contents could be added through subpages with the name of the institution (MediaWiki:Course description/Example University, for example), and that would be used instead when courses at that institution were created.

Category:MyCourses Did You Know

Pages in this category were used for the "Did You Know" box that appeared on Special:MyCourses. One page from the category was chosen randomly each time MyCourses was loaded.