Talk:Community Development/WikiLearn

Wikiversity

Hello,

can you please tell what functionalities are needed, that are not in Wikiversity available. I think that if you tell the things what are needed then maybe there is someone who can create the functionality if it is not there at the moment. --Hogü-456 (talk) 19:42, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Hi, Hogü-456. We did not mention functionalities, but functionaries, which is an English term for people performing specific functions. In English Wikipedia and Meta jargon, "functionaries" is a collective term for volunteers with the Checkuser, Oversighter, or Bureaucrat roles, as well as members of arbitration committees. The Anti-Harassment course is aimed at "functionaries" and administrators. Asaf (WMF) (talk) 00:08, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

@Asaf (WMF): Presumably the question was a reference to the part of the Q&A section mentioning that they want a "higher level of functionality" than Wikiversity is thought to be able to provide. --Yair rand (talk) 03:10, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

@Yair rand:@Hogü-456: - oh, quite so! I apologize, I misread the question, thinking of the Anti-Harassment course. To the actual question, then: Wikiversity is, as far as I know, a plain Mediawiki without any features for running courses: a notion of enrollment, assignments, grading and assessment, completion statistics and progress tracking, designated instructors, etc. etc. It is theoretically possible to extend Mediawiki to implement all those things, but it would be a far larger investment than licensing mature technology that already exists, and it's an investment our team is not authorized to make. Asaf (WMF) (talk) 11:41, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

Name

The name is a bit confusing; I first misread it as WikiToLearn. Nemo 21:12, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I suppose people familiar with WikiToLearn may be momentarily confused. We think it's a tolerable price, for the benefit of a clear and easy to remember name (and subdomain name for the Moodle site). Asaf (WMF) (talk) 22:05, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

Timing

As I understand it, there will be eight weekly sessions, starting on Monday 1 February 2021. As Wikimedians live all over the world, it would be fine to have a rough indication of the time (including timezone) of these courses. Interested people might have to arrange something if courses happen to be at times they normally are asleep, at work,... I do have some flexibility myself, but not everyone does so. Thanks for your answer. Sincerely, RonnieV (talk) 23:34, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

I see in the specific course that times will be indicated later, after participants have been selected and that interested people can indicate their timezone. Just the timezone doesn't answer everything about availability (think morning people, nightbirds, day time obligations,...). Thanks anyway, RonnieV (talk) 23:54, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

Hi RonnieV, thank you for reaching out! We asked that participants provide their timezone as we will be using this data to determine the best time to schedule weekly sessions for each course once we have a final pool of applicants. This will be communicated to each participant in their acceptance email as well as an on-boarding call before the first session. Our goal is to ensure no one is joining a session very early or late in their day. This is the 1st phase of our online learning pilot and we plan to experiment with different models of scheduling live sessions to ensure we are always practicing timezone equity in future phases of the project. Best, SRamkisson (WMF)