Creating Accessible Courses/Use Wikipedia to manage course information

All courses have a range of information and resources to help people to learn the topics, complete the assignments and achieve the learning outcomes. Many course facilitators, teachers and administrators have a range of preferred or recommended resources to help people with their learning. This assignment challenges you to find all the Wikipedia articles that relate to your course, and begin using those articles to manage your list of resources.

Why Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is the most visited reference website in the world, and the fifth most visited website over all. It is accessible to low bandwidth users, and people on phones. It can be edited by anyone, and that anyone could be you.

Volunteer Wikipedia editors strive to improve the quality of all articles on Wikipedia, and if you collaborate with them you may find a way to improve the resources you know people use and maybe even rely on to study your course. You might simply list a range of important references in the "See Also" section of a Wikipedia article. You might like to add information to the actual article (supported by your credible references of course). You may even like to upload media such as images, videos or diagrams if this type of content would help explain the subject better. You may even consider setting assignments that help do all this and more.

The proposition here is that with the help of Wikipedia volunteers, your time and effort, and the work of your course participants, you could develop an excellent reference library that supports people learning your subject, on a platform they know and use.

Tasks

1. Create a Wikipedia account, or sign in with your Wikiversity username.
2. Create a userpage with a link back to your Wikiversity course outline.
3. Compile your reference list you would use in the teaching of your subject area, and check them against Wikipedia's Reliable sources guidelines
4. Search Wikipedia for articles that relate to your course, and add any you find to your Watchlist. Make note of the extensiveness and quality of the articles, especially sections like 'See Also', 'External Links', 'Bibliography', 'References' or 'Citations'.
5. Review your watchlist and prioritise the articles according to relevance to your course. Create links to that prioritised list on your Wikiversity course outline
6. Begin editing highly prioritised Wikipedia articles, ensuring to abide by policies and guidelines, not to promote your course, but to improve the informative writing of the article. Consider the article's talk page, and the sections for 'Citations' and 'External links'.
7. Consider uploading media to Wikimedia Commons, either with your own content, or by negotiating copyrights with other authors and uploading their media on their behalf
8. Continue to develop efficient work practices on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, and list articles and media on your course outline when you are satisfied they are useful resources to your course.
9. Consider setting an assignment in your course that asks participants to help you manage the range of Wikipedia articles related to the subject. More more ideas on this, refer to Activity, assignments and assessment
10. Consider creating a book of your selected Wikipedia articles that may be used to download the entire collection in PDF or OpenDocument format for offline reading.