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Wikipedia:Education program/Assignment Design Wizard

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The Assignment Design Wizard is a tool built by Wiki Education Foundation to help instructors create Wikipedia classroom assignments that follow best practices. (It serves as a replacement for {{course page wizard}} and similar templates, which don't offer much opportunity for customizing the standard syllabus boilerplate or reshuffling the course timeline.)

The main way to reach the wizard is to complete the WP:EDUCATORS training. At the end, users can launch the Assignment Design Wizard, which walks them through the components of a good Wikipedia assignment and lets them choose options for their class. At the end, the wizard posts a draft course page to their userspace.

Code and development

Comments, questions, suggestions? Ask Sage Ross, the product manager for the Assignment Design Wizard.

Text of the wizard

The text of the wizard itself is part of the source code. In particular:

Raw output code

The main output of the wizard is a block of wikitext — mostly a combination of templates and substituted templates — that comes from these files in the source code:

  • Course details template, which is the first part of the output. This template includes parameters reflecting some of the choices the user made while going through the wizard, as well as the basic details of the course they entered at the beginning.
  • Course description: This block of text comes directly from user input at the end of the wizard.
  • Timeline: This block of text gets from the assignment components in this file based on the length of the course and the choices the user made.
  • Grading template, which comes at the end.

For an example of the raw wikitext that gets posted to Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Education program/Assignment Design Wizard/example output. Here's the correpsonding page after substitution: [1] (Note that line breaks are inserted by with calls to the substituted template {{Wikipedia:Education program/Assignment Design Wizard/spaces}}.)

On-wiki assignment components

See also: Category:Assignment Design Wizard output templates and Category:Assignment Design Wizard formatting templates

Course details and description

Course name
Underwater Basket Weaving
Institution
University of Wikipedia
Instructor
Sage (Wiki Ed)
Subject
Arts and crafts
Course dates
January 1, 2014 – December 31, 2013
Approximate number of student editors
over 9000


Timeline components

Week-by-week headers and formatting templates

  • {{Wikipedia:Education program/Assignment Design Wizard/course week 1}}: used for the first week)
  • {{Wikipedia:Education program/Assignment Design Wizard/course week}}: used for all other weeks)
  • {{start of course week}}: This template takes a set of dates as parameters, and lists those as the days on which the class meets on a given week.
  • {{in class}}: This marks the start of the "In class" section of a week's assignment plan, which describes activities that should happen in the classroom.
  • {{class workshop}}: This marks the start of the "Workshop in class or outside of class" section of a week's assignment plan, which describes activities that should happen during an organized workshop session.
  • {{assignment}}: This marks the start of the "Assignments" section of a week's assignment plan, which describes what students are assigned to complete on their own. It takes the a parameter to indicate when the assignment is due (typically the next week).
  • {{assignment milestones}}: This marks the start of the "Milestones" section of a week's assignment plan, which describes milestones the class is expected to have completed by this point.
  • {{Wikipedia:Education program/Assignment Design Wizard/timeline box}}: This is the formatting template that creates the boxes around sections of content. It's included in some of the above templates.
  • {{end of course week}}: This marks the end of a week's content. Functionally, it simply closes the last div of the timeline box for a given week.

Wikipedia essentials

  • Overview of the course
  • Introduction to how Wikipedia will be used in the course
  • Understanding Wikipedia as a community, we'll discuss its expectations and etiquette
  • Handout: Editing Wikipedia (available in print or online from the Wiki Education Foundation)
  • Basics of editing
  • Anatomy of Wikipedia articles, what makes a good article, how to distinguish between good and bad articles
  • Collaborating and engaging with the Wiki editing community
  • Tips on finding the best articles to work on for class assignments
  • Handouts: Using Talk Pages handout and Evaluating Wikipedia brochure
  • Create an account and then complete the online training for students. During this training, you will make edits in a sandbox and learn the basic rules of Wikipedia.
  • Create a User page, and then click the "enroll" button on the top left of this course page.
  • To practice editing and communicating on Wikipedia, introduce yourself on the user talk page of one of your classmates, who should also be enrolled in the table at the bottom of the page.
  • Explore topics related to your topic area to get a feel for how Wikipedia is organized. What areas seem to be missing? As you explore, make a mental note of articles that seem like good candidates for improvement.
  • All students have Wikipedia user accounts and are listed on the course page.

Grading

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