Workshop Report

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Report for eL4C54 Online WikiEducator Workshop

Background

The Learn Wiki Skills for leveraging the potential of Open Educational Resources free online workshop was held from June 26 - July 10, 2013.
The workshop's objectives were to provide basic training to the participants in learning Wiki skills so that they can create, develop, search or adopt Open Educational Resources and make use of WikiEducator platform in their teaching learning setting. Truly the theme "leveraging the potential of Open Educational Resources" is so fitting for this purpose.

Expected Output

The expected outcomes of the workshop were:

  • Help participants to acquire basic wiki editing skills which they would practice and demonstrate on their User page;
  • Provide them with an authentic WikiEducator experience
  • Help them to achieve the community certification (and community kudos) of a WikiApprentice Level 2 or even WikiBuddy during this workshop. The skills participants will demonstrate on their User page would be used for our community certification according to our WikiMaster typology.
  • Provide opportunities for the participants to give the gift of knowledge by developing or donating a teaching resource for our community.

Resource Requirements

This free wiki workshop was presented online over 8 working days and required approximately 15 - 20 minutes per day of practical exercises after reading the instructions. We advised all participants to dedicate about 1 hour a day to ensure good practice of the instructions and guidelines provided. This time period also made allowances for the sometimes low internet connectivity. The course was presented asynchronously -- so as to allow participants to work at times which fit their own schedule.
Daily instructions were provided to the participants and WikiEducator Moodle platform was also used to establish interaction with the participants.

Programme Schedule

  • 2 June 2013: Registrations began

Day 1: Wednesday, 26 June 2013

  • Instructions for Day 1

Day 2: Thursday, 27 June 2013

  • Instructions for Day 2: So what about quality in open wiki authoring?

Day 3: Friday, 28 June 2013

  • Instructions for Day 3: how to personalize your own WikiEducator preferences

Day 4: Saturday, 29 June 2013

Day 5: Monday, 1 July 2013

  • Instructions for Day 5: Internal and External links

Day 6: Tuesday, 2 July 2013

  • Instructions for Day 6 - Images and your 2nd wiki certification!

Day 7: Thursday, 3 July 2013

  • Instructions for Day 7: Collaborative Editing

Day 8: Friday, 4 July 2013

Day 9: Monday, 5 July 2013

  • Instructions for Day 9: Working offline, converting and uploading teaching materials

Day 10: Tuesday, 6 July 2013

  • Instructions for Day 10: Share your experiences, thoughts and suggestions

Target Participants

The training programme was targeted at educators who wish to use online mode of instructions for the benefit of their students, teachers who wish to have online collaborations with other colleagues, and anyone who has interest in learning more about WikiEducator.

Outcome and Demographics

The workshop consisted of the following demographics:

Total Participation by Gender and Country Distribution

Total participants: 111 (including facilitators)

  • Female = 57
  • Male = 54


There were three registrations, which could not be accomodated this time because their registrations were received at the stage when the workshop was in advanced stage. All such interested colleagues were requested to keep looking for announcement for our next WikiEducator Learning4Content Workshop.

This workshop was facilitated by Ramesh Sharma, Dr Gita Mathur and Dr Pankaj Khare.
Facilitators

Countries

This workshop was truly international in character as we had participants from 21 countries....

Flag of Bhutan.svg Bhutan
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Flag of Brazil.svg Brazil
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Flag of Egypt.svg Egypt
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Flag of Greece.svg Greece
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Flag of Guyana.svg Guyana
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Flag of India.svg India
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Flag of Jamaica.svg Jamaica
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Flag of Kenya.svg Kenya
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Flag of Mexico.svg Mexico
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Flag of Morocco.svg Morocco
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Flag of Nigeria1.svg Nigeria
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Flag of Pakistan.svg Pakistan
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Flag of Poland.svg Poland
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Flag of Rwanda.svg Rwanda
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Flag of Solomon Islands.svg Solomon Islands
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Flag of Spain.svg Spain
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Flag of Sri Lanka.svg Sri Lanka
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Flag of Tanzania.svg Tanzania
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Flag of Tunisia.svg Tunisia
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Flag of United Kingdom.svg United Kingdom
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Flag of USA.svg USA
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Online Interactive Sessions

To support our participants for providing them with relevant information about Wikieducator, Wiki commands and syntax etc, two live sessions were organised:

  1. First live session was conducted on Sat, Jun 29, 2013. Please see recording of the session by visiting this link. This session was attended by 14 participants.
  2. Some of the participants could not attend our first live session on 29 June 2013, therefore we conducted another live session on Thursday, July 4, 2013 Mastering Wiki Editing Skills which was attended by 18 participants. The recording of the session "Mastering Wiki Editing Skills" can be seen here.

Wiki Discussions

  • General Forum

Important questions were raised by colleagues like


  • Concerns about the quality of educational resources developed using an open authoring approach

Useful discussion was held at the page on Thoughts on Quality. Main participants who expressed their views are:


  • Ideas for a wiki project

The colleagues expressed their intention of working on a Community Development Learning Project.

Top high performing participants

We noted that participants were enthusiastic about updating content on their pages or leaving comments on other's userpages. Congratulations to the top high performing participants in terms of number of edits so far on the wikieductor site!
Below mentioned are those colleagues who got edit count for more than 60 in this workshop:-

  1. Susan Dixon 388 edits
  2. jasmeet Kaur 110 edits
  3. Vanita Chapra 86 edits
  4. Kamani Samarasinghe 79 edits
  5. Seema Sirpal 74 edits
  6. Katarzyna Geraghty 67 edits
  7. Deepty Gupta 65 edits
  8. Malabika Sen 62 edits

Reflections

At the outset I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to Dr Wayne Mackintosh and Jim Tittsler for their support at every stage of this workshop. Be it configuring Moodle instance, registrations or seeking extra information, both Wayne and Jim were always there. I understand Wayne is busy in conducting two micro Open Online Courses (mOOCs):Scenario Planning for Educators i.e.SP4Ed 13.07(to be held from 29 July - 8 August 2013) and Open content licensing for educators i.e.OCL4Ed 13.09 (to be held from 4 to 18 September 2013).

Further I thank my co-facilitators Dr Gita Mathur and Dr Pankaj Khare who wonderfully and skillfully provided their guidance to all the participants by visiting their userpages, advising them on wiki skills, interacting with them during both the live sessions and via emails. It was for the first time that there were two live and interactive sessions on wiki skills. Thank you Dr Gita and Dr Pankaj! It was a wonderful experience once again to work with you!!

My deep appreciation is for all colleagues who joined this (first of 2013) workshop. It is sure a huge response to our call and further reflects the need for such online collaborative skills for content development for elearning. Most of the organisations are now adopting elearning practices and are gearing up for creating content to be released as Open Educational Resources. I am sure this workshop will go in a long way to fulfill this dream of such individuals and institutions. We wish to congratulate all of you who have been awarded with certifications and hope that other shall get inspiration from you to develop their pages. Many of you have indicated to keep working on community development projects. Keep doing good work. WE community is at your service whenever you need any help,do let us know.

Keep coming back to WikiEducator main page. Do join both the free micro Open Online Courses as indicated above. I am sure learning would be a fun there!
With best wishes
--Ramesh Sharma, PhD 11:10, 14 July 2013 (UTC)