In 2021, the Community Development team launched two online courses as part of the WikiLearn Pilot that was delivered over an 8-week period. Participants who enrolled in either course attended live sessions each week and completed graded assignments. The goal of the pilot was to better understand how our team could deliver capacity building experiences online.
The Community Development team is pleased to announce these courses are now available for self-guided study on the new WikiLearn platform, based on the free software Open edX. Open edX is a free software learning management system that was started in 2012, and is developed in Python using the Django framework. The platform will host courses developed by Wikimedia Foundation teams on a variety of topics relevant to doing Wikimedia work. The intended audience of the platform is Wikimedia contributors of all kinds, and all you need to access the platform is your existing Wikimedia account. As we continue to evolve some governance mechanisms for the platform, it will become open for contribution from all Wikimedia contributors.
You can access the platform at learn.wiki
The courses currently available from the Community Development team are:
- Introduction to Building Partnerships – This course will provide an in-depth curriculum on how to develop meaningful programmatic and organizational partnerships within the movement and with external partners.
- Addressing Harassment Online – This short, introductory course will focus on developing skills that will help volunteers empathetically respond to online harassment.
These courses are self-paced and graded by the original instructors of the live course. A computer graded version of these courses will be available shortly.
Please note that the self-paced/human-graded format will return marked assignments on a bi-weekly/monthly basis depending on capacity.
Each course has been adapted from its original live format to be suitable for self-paced study. The Identifying and Addressing Harassment course was authored and taught by Simona Ramkisson. The Introduction to Partnership Building course was authored and taught by Asaf Bartov.
All Wikimedians with an active Wikimedia account can login to the WikiLearn platform using their Wikimedia identity (OAuth) without needing a separate account.
As we continue to evolve some governance mechanisms for the platform, it will become open for contribution from all Wikimedia contributors. The current courses are published in English with potential translation possible in FY 22-23.
If you have any questions or concerns about the courses or the WikiLearn platform, please email the Community Development team at comdevteam@wikimedia.org
Thank you,
The Community Development Team
Can you help us translate this article?
In order for this article to reach as many people as possible we would like your help. Can you translate this article to get the message out?
Start translation