“Writing for Wikipedia has engaged my students like nothing else.
They are some of the most pedagogically powerful assignments
I’ve incorporated into my classes.”— Adeline Koh, instructor, Stockton University
Teaching science with Wikipedia transforms a classroom’s boundaries. Instead of writing a paper that gets thrown away at the end of the term, university students research and write Wikipedia articles on course topics.
A Wikipedia assignment transforms a typical science writing exercise into real-world science communication experience. Along the way, your students help share knowledge about your discipline with millions of readers.
As a science instructor for a university or college, you can bring the publishing power of Wikipedia to your classroom, even if you have never contributed to Wikipedia.
The Wiki Education Foundation (Wiki Ed) is a nonprofit organization that helps fill content gaps — like those in the sciences — on Wikipedia, while providing students a truly unique learning experience. We’re partnered with well-known scientific academic associations, such as the Association for Psychological Science, the American Society of Plant Biologists, and the Linguistic Society of America.
We’re calling 2016 the Year of Science. We’ve partnered with Google and the Simons Foundation to connect our free, open source resources to science instructors across the United States and Canada.
We provide:
- Tools to help you design a clear, effective plan for working with Wikipedia in your course.
- Tools to track your student’s contributions to Wikipedia.
- Online trainings for you and your students to make meaningful contributions with less than two hours of prep time.
- Free printed materials for every student, offering detailed assistance on writing Wikipedia articles. We offer an extra article writing handbook for writing articles about chemistry, genes and proteins, ecology, psychology, and medicine.
- Expert Wikipedia staff who will monitor your students’ work on Wikipedia, and offer specific guidance concerning Wikipedia policies and formats. You stay in complete control of your course content.
Whether you’ve always been excited to bring Wikipedia into your classroom, or you’re just curious to discuss some ideas, we’d love to hear from you. We’re still accepting courses for Spring 2016.
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Photo: “StFX Physical Sciences Lab” by StFX – StFX. Licensed under CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.
