Wikidata:Wikidata for Education/About

Background of the project

In 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic made it dangerous for children and teachers to attend school in a face to face environment. Distance learning became a necessity. At the same time, education systems were unprepared to seamlessly shift to online learning. Besides a lack of technological infrastructure, worldwide we were unprepared to take advantage of the opportunities present in open educational resources and the semantic web to support the continuation of learning during this unprecedented crisis.

In the wake of the UNESCO recommendation on the use of Open Education Resources, and in the framework of the UNESCO Global Coalition for the response to COVID-19 in Education, the Wikimedia Foundation proposes to build capacity in education systems to make data about curriculum open, and include it in Wikidata so that aligned open educational resources can be easily found, adapted and used by teachers, students and caregivers.

About Wikidata

Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, Wikisource, and others.

About UNESCO's Global Education Coalition

The Global Education Coalition launched was launched by UNESCO in early 2020, which seeks to facilitate inclusive learning opportunities for children and youth during this period of sudden and unprecedented educational disruption.

Investment in remote learning should both mitigate the immediate disruption caused by COVID-19 and establish approaches to develop more open and flexible education systems for the future.

UNESCO's OER Recommendations

In 2019, UNESCO adopted a recommendation on OERs, encouraging governments worldwide to support the production, curation and use of OERs for classroom learning.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Read more about UNESCO's OER recommendation.

How can you get involved

For Wikimedia community members, there are many ways to contribute – by providing feedback, helping others, being part of the community focus group, translating content...