Education/News/June 2019/Wikiclassroom: New way for students' inspiration

Author: Susanna Mkrtchyan

Summary:

Wikimedia Armenia started a pilot project: Wikiclassroom encouraging students creative learning through Wikipedia

Education in different countries more or less is in crisis. Here we are describing our new Wikiclassroom initiative, the result of which pleasantly surprised us. More than five years of experience of running wikiclubs shows that contribution to wiki projects, such as Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and Wikisource, suits all students: smart or not. Each student can find his or her niche and grow! They get profound knowledge, they acquire learning skills such as literacy, concentration, perception skills and thinking abilities. Even very pessimistic principals of schools notice that students enhance their performance. In order to achieve more impact in getting knowledge by students, this year we started a new project: Wikiclassroom.

Wikiclassroom is a process of studying the subject through Wikipedia. In Wikiclassroom teacher and students change their roles. Current lesson performance is made by students. We run this pilot program in Lernapat: a rural region of Armenia. The result amazed us. Students become enthusiastic, the collaborative creative work suits the teacher as well.

At the same time, the experiment was implemented in Karvachar's school, a city of Nagorno- Karabagh, for another subject. Here the coordinator of the wikiclub and the teacher of social sciences cooperated over the tasks which are given to the students and schools. Instead of writing just papers as tasks, the teacher asked the students to edit articles in Wikipedia on certain themes.

Although it started spontaneously, the result was hopeful. In both cases, students became more interested in wiki projects and started editing additional Wikipedia articles. How will it work in the future? Why is it important and interesting not only for kids but also for the teachers? Will other teachers join the project?