Education/News/September 2022/OpenEdu.ch: centralising training documents, a platform for the teachers' community in Switzerland
OpenEdu.ch: centralising training documents, a platform for the teachers' community in Switzerland
Education in Switzerland
In Switzerland, education is the responsibility of each of its 26 regions (cantons), making for a very decentralised approach to education. This has its strength: every region’s cultural aspects (such as regional language, for example) are put in the centre, but this also creates important shortcomings; teachers and educators don’t necessarily communicate or share knowledge. In addition in Switzerland, the need for schools to media literacy is really high.
Much like the Swiss education system, the training materials surrounding Wikimedia projects (especially Wikipedia and Wikidata, which are the tools with the most sought-after training) are decentralised, and even though a lot of them can be found on Wikimedia projects, many are hosted elsewhere, and their usability is not always a given.
Wikimedia CH’s response to this problem is OpenEdu.ch.
Openedu.ch as knowledge management system
This platform aggregates all training documents about different Wiki tools created either by volunteers/community members or by Wikimedia chapters in 4 languages (English, French, German and Italian) with the objective to centralise these documents and make them easily available for all educators.
The platform will include search filters enabling sorting through the available training by the objective of teaching (e.g., using Wikipedia for a History lesson), study level (e.g., elementary school), and type of targeted learners (e.g., beginners) enabling searching to be as straightforward as possible.
The platform will eventually include different pedagogical documents about media literacy in general which can be used by teachers directly in the classroom.
Collaborating with Openedu.ch
If you are interested in knowing more about the project and/or proposing content, don’t hesitate to contact the Wikimedia CH chapter.
Wikimedia CH is looking for collaborators to fill the platform with new content.