WikiToLearn User Group/Reports/2018 Report

This page presents a brief overview of the activities of the WikiTolearn User Group both online and offline in 2018.

We focused on the creation of free content, on importing already existing material which was donated to the community, and on the development of the platform to make it suitable and user friendly to real-time usage in class. Much time was dedicated to outreach activities, in order to bring more developers and more students into WikiToLearn and Wikimedia Foundation, and to the elaboration of a plan for prioritizing the technical enhancement of the next version of the platform. We have been working on outreach activities using in-person meetings, developer blogs and our Telegram channel, while continuing our collaboration with the world of academia and reaching university students and professors.
The number of readers of the imported content has been in line with previous records: in November, for instance, 13.200 users visited the new content.

Highlight activities include:

24 March: meeting with Wikimedia CH in Bern. We participated in the yearly meeting and discussed action plans for schools.
13 July: a co-design workshop was held in the University of Milano-Bicocca on determining our strategy and involving the stakeholders.
17 September: 2 more co-design workshops in the University of Milano-Bicocca between our members and the main stakeholders to talk about technological enhancements of the platform in terms of features, plans to expand in the humanities field and testing the use of WikiToLearn as a blended-learning tool in universities both in Italy and abroad.

Funding

GARR awarded a 19.000 EUR scolarship to the main developer of the new infrastructure, to allow for a seamless operation.
A grant of 10.000 CHF from Wikimedia CH was used for: collecting content donations and converting it to mediawiki (resulting in 10 new books on different subjects) and on launching a guided learning experiment project at the University of Pavia.

Widen the audience collaborating with WTL by hosting more generic and appealing content. In this regard we would especially like to target high school students.
Improve the current software for the generation of PDFs (a MediaWiki plugin) in order to distribute them through Wikimedia Commons or Wikipedia articles.