2019:Education/Open Educational Resources in the Wikimedia Ecosystem: Housing OER where People Already Look (Hiding the keys under the streetlamp)

Education/Open Educational Resources in the Wikimedia Ecosystem: Housing OER where People Already Look (Hiding the keys under the streetlamp)

Title

Should More Open Educational Resources (Like Textbooks) be in the Wikimedia Ecosystem? Housing OER where people already look

Session leader(s)

Full Name*	Email address*	Wikimedia Username (if you have one)	Affiliation	Country	Role, website or any other details you'd like to share
Meredith Jacob	mjacob@wcl.american.edu	Mjacobdc	American University Washington College of Law	USA
Zoe Wake Hyde			Rebus Community	Canada

Session type

Each Space at Wikimania 2019 will have specific format requests. The program design prioritises submissions which are future-oriented and directly engage the audience. The format of this submission is a:

• Workshop to identify and try to solve problem -60 min /

Length of session

Please indicate how long you'd like your session to be, in consideration with the above described

60 Minutes

Description

Wikipedia currently acts as the starting point for many students and educators when they want to learn about a new topic.  However, most Open Educational Resources (OER) are primarily accessed through repositories that only contain a small subsection of resources.   This session seeks to explore whether it’s useful to more directly integrate OER within Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons for reasons of findability, updating, and more. Within the OER community, there are significant concerns about findability, peer review, ability to track and mark updates and localization, and long-term support for repositories.  There is often discussion within the community about whether yet another repository or platform could solve this problem. The goal of this workshop would be to examine the technical solutions available on the wikimedia platforms against the needs of the OER community to see if and how it would make sense to use wikipedia as a structure to house, update and deliver OER.

This session is intended to be an exploratory session for this problem - how to house OER in a format that preserves the teaching and learning purposes, but also integrates them with the technical expertise and global user base of Wikimedia.  

Supporting work

Optional:

• Link 1
• Link 2

Relationship to the theme

This session will address the conference theme — Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals — in the following manner:

This Project most directly relates to SDG 4 - quality education, and SDG 10, reduced inequality, as the access to high quality open educational resources for free improves access to education regardless of ability to pay.

Session outcomes

At the end of the session, the following will have been achieved: this is a exploratory session to see whether the technical capabilities and community purposes of wikisource and wikipedia match up with the needs that are driving new repository development in the OER community. A successful outcome would either be the answer "yes, there may be a way forward here with more work" or "no, wikisource and wikipedia are not aligned with the needs of the OER community".

Relation to other Spaces

This overlaps with the Partnerships space.

Requirements

The session will work best with these conditions:

• Room: roundtable discussion for 20-25 people, white board ideally

• Audience: 15-25 people with a mix of technical and education backgrounds - some who are more familiar with the technical infrastructure of wikisource and wikipedia

• Recording: Recording is permissible, but may not be able to capture the full discussion