Wikinews:Course pages
Student assignments should use course pages and all students assignments should use a course page.
Background edit
A course page should help the Wikinews community identify the instructor, students, ambassador(s), and student news articles. Details on the assignment and how it will be graded are also valuable. Course pages allow editors to discriminate between editor-specific and classroom-specific issues, so that constructive feedback can be targeted to the right place.
Education Program course and institution pages edit
A course page using the Education Program namespace is a structured page that organizes information related to a course.
Structured course pages show:
- Course name
- Term
- Start and end dates
- Number of students
- Whether the course is in session
- Description of the course (often including a syllabus)
- Instructors
- Campus ambassadors
- Online ambassadors
- Students
- Articles the students are working on
Wikinews administrators and Course instructors may create, edit, or delete a course page. Any user may 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 may be set that must be entered upon enrollment. Any user may sign up to review a student's work by clicking "Become a reviewer" next to the article in the list, and a reviewer may opt out at any time.
An Institution page in the "Education Program" namespaces shows courses offered at a specific learning institution.
An institution page shows:
- Institution name
- Location
- All Wikinews Education Program courses (past, present, and planned) at that institution
Wikinews administrators and Course instructors may create, edit, or delete an institution page.
Creating an Education Program course page edit
To set up an EP course page, you need to have a user account on Wikinews that has the rights to do so (either admin rights, or any of the "course" rights). If you are the instructor for a class, you can be assigned the "Course instructor" right. (You must have an account; we cannot assign the right to anonymous, "IP" editors). If you are an instructor working independently of the Wikinews Education Program, please post a message at the water cooler to request the course instructor right and describe what your class will be doing on Wikinews. Before you make a request, you are strongly encouraged to go through the training for educators to familiarize yourself with best practices for Wikinews assignments.
- Check to see whether your institution (e.g., your college or university) is already in Wikinews’s course page system by going to Special:Institutions. If not, add it. (If you are logged in and have the “Course instructor” right, you should see an “Add a new institution” section above the list of institutions already in the system.)
- Go to your institution page, then start your course page. In the “Add a course” section, select your institution from the pulldown menu, enter the course name and the term (e.g., 2013 Q1), and click “Add course.”
- Fill in the details for your course including an “enrollment token” that your students will use as the code to allow them to enroll on the course page, the start and end dates, and a description of the course in general and what students will be trying to do on Wikinews in particular—and then press “Submit” to create the course page.
- After your course page has been started, you can send your students the URL of your course page along with the enrollment token, and they can sign up as students in the course (once they have created their Wikinews accounts). You can then use the Special:MyCourses page (linked from the top of the page near your username as "Courses") to see recent activity from your students.
- Wizard
- {{Course page wizard}} - Simply add this code to a structured course page in "Education Program:" namespace, and it will walk you through adding the standard sections, with example content for full course timeline and a grading rubric (which you can adapt or replace with your own). The result will look something like this example course.
Creating an independent course page edit
One can create their own independent course page in user space. One may adapt the template provided this course page.
- Wizard
- {{Course page}} - This is used to build a course page in the "Wikinews:" namespace.
Related special pages edit
The course pages extension includes a number of special pages for displaying the users, pages, and activity associated with courses: Special:SpecialPages#Education.
This page displays displays activity feeds for all active courses a user is associated with (whether as student, instructor, or online or campus volunteer), such as when students make edits to their articles or create their user pages.
This page lets users see which courses they are enrolled in as students or are instructors or online or campus volunteers for. Students may add articles they are working on through this page. Instructors can see the student tables from multiple courses at once on this page.
This page lists all the courses in the system, and allows users with the right to do so to add new courses. By default it shows only current courses, but the list of courses can 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 can also delete multiple courses at once through this page.
This page lists all the institutions in the system, and allows users with the right to do so to add new institutions. By default it shows all institutions, but the list can be filtered to show only those with active courses and/or only institutions in a specific country.
This page lists all students enrolled in course pages, and which current courses (if any) they are enrolled in.
This page indicates the overall activity level of students across all courses, and lists recent editing activity from students.
Interface messages edit
The contents of this page get preloaded in the page text field when a new course is being created. Institution specific contents can be added a subpages with the name of the institution (MediaWiki:Course description/Example University, for example), and that will be used instead when courses at that institution are created.
- MediaWiki:Course header (not currently used, but it will work if page is created)
The contents of this page will appear at the top of every course page.
Pages in this category are used for the "Did You Know" box that appears on Special:MyCourses. One page from the category is chosen randomly each time MyCourses is loaded.
Related templates edit
This is a template for building course page content section by section, similar to {{course page}} (which is for course pages in the Wikinews: namespace). It guides users through the creation of three subpages in the Education Program talk: namespace that get transcluded onto the main course page, with default content for a course description, a course timeline, and a grading rubric, which instructors can replace or adapt to their own courses.
- {{Course page 2/Timeline/preload}} is the preloaded example course timeline. It should be kept up to date with best practices for Wikinews assignments.
This notice is included at the top of course pages that use the course page wizard, and can be used for announcements and notices that are relevant to all courses (such as guidance for working around bugs that cause significant confusion).