Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Miscellaneous/Making Mediawiki MOOC-ready

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Making Mediawiki MOOC-ready

  • Problem: The Wikiversity missed the massive open online course (MOOC) train. Even the WikiMOOC, which teach how to contribute to Wikipedia, wasn't hosted on Wikiversity. For our movement to gains acceptance in the educational field, and eager of people to learn through MOOC platforms, Mediawiki needs a serious upgrade. This could be in the form of an upgrade to the MW:Extension:Quiz extension.
  • Who would benefit: The Wikiversity communities, of course, but also anyone looking for an inhouse MOOC platform. Plus, more contributors and content on a single linguistic Wikversity version make it far more likely to find benevolent translators through its skilled community and its already well tooled translation environment.
  • Proposed solution:
    • enable users to follow their progress by giving ability to record result of evaluation form
    • provide
      • ease publication of existing courses
      • possibly, way to validate knowledge/skill acquisition
        • online, with some strong identity control and avoidance of least elaborated cheat
        • offline, with tool which ease coordination of exam sessions in dedicated places
    • establishing a list of feature that a MOOC platform must have to be successful is part of this proposal, please feed the proposal
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:

Discussion[edit]

  • See also Wikimedia MOOC platform and related Phabricator project for an on-going discussion on this matter. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Noé (talk)
    This could also just be an improvement of MW:Extension:Quiz to allow the exercises results persistence and consultation. JackPotte (talk) 18:03, 8 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    That's indeed one aspect to improve it. But it also should be improved in UX terms, so users might create forms with the VE for example. Also I don't remember if it's already possible to have a larger set of question than the one displayed so the user might face different set of questions each time. Adding a difficulty score to each question, one might also adapt questions to the user previous results. Probably a large bunch of that might be implemented with modules and templates which takes care of all the adaptive behaviour, but data persistence and form edit UX are less likely implementable without dedicated development in the extension. --Psychoslave (talk) 11:12, 9 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    The MOOC module has been implemented on Wikiversity in Portuguese, and we are now developing our first course. We have relied on the modules that were released on Wikiversity in English, for instance the course on Web Science. I agree these modules would benefit with some improving. --Joalpe (talk) 03:47, 9 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    Thank you I wasn't aware of that. I think that we should spread the word within versions of Wikiversity. --Psychoslave (talk) 11:12, 9 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd like to note that this proposal as it currently stands is very vague. What exact changes are you proposing? The community tech team works on software development, not partnerships with institutions. Is there consensus for what you're asking for? -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 21:39, 20 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Psychoslave: please see my above comment. -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 00:24, 22 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @NKohli:,

What exact changes are you proposing?
I think that the less vague demand is an improvement of the Quiz extension
  • it should allows users to keep a record of their previous results. The legal team should also take a look at this for privacy consideration I think.
    • A board which enable to have an overview of progress would be fine too.
  • editors should be able to use only visual editor to build quiz forms

For institutional partners, we actually already have some, at least on the French Wikiversity we have courses which were provided by the CNED like Mise en œuvre de l’accessibilité numérique and Convertir une formation existante au format MOOC. So no one seems against this kind of partnership. Providing more suited tools will only help to attract more release of courses by institutional structures.

Does this answer your demand? --Psychoslave (talk) 07:56, 22 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, sorry for the late reply. You pinged the wrong person. I'll update the proposal description a bit according to your revised version. Thanks. -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 23:38, 27 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Feels like Not Invented Here syndrome. Surely it is easier and more productive to fix an exiting, high-quality MOOC framework to use MediaWiki authentication, design and stats, than to implement some half-baked MOOC functionality in an extension... --Tgr (talk) 08:24, 28 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting[edit]