Wikidata talk:Wikidata for Education

This project is in early phase, please feel free to share your comments and thoughts with us!

1 Project specific discussions

Project specific discussions

Use this space to discuss the use of curricula data in different projects. Are you interested to make use of the curricula data in your field? Get in touch with us at educationwikimedia.org

Digitization of educational standards

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Curriculum standards digitization is the process of converting official curriculum standard documents (print or PDF) into machine-readable formats.

Curriculum standards can be stored in different ways:

Wikipedia pages: individual wiki pages containing semi-structured data based on pre-defined conventions for different headings and templates. See these examples: Math:B4.1.5.1 and History:B4.2.5.1.
Wikidata items for each standard, with formally-defined properties and relations that capture the curriculum standard documents' structure.
A hybrid approach: consisting of wikipedia pages that support free-form editing and creation of structured data as used in commons.

Actions:

Obtain curriculum standards data in machine readable format from Ministry of Education or curriculum body (e.g. spreadsheets) so it can be automatically imported.
Convert the curriculum documents into structured, machine-readable data formats (manual data entry).
Import curriculum standards data for countries where data is available in digital format (USA, Australia, and Brazil).
Curriculum body approves the curriculum standards data to give it "official" status.
Assign unique identifiers to each standard node

Example use cases:

School administrators, educators, and teachers can browse the published curriculum standards and use them to coordinate teaching activities.

Why Wikidata and Not another software or platform

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When curriculum standards are digitized, we want to make it publicly available towards innovation in the education sector globally. Innovation is possible when everyone contributes their ideas and implement their models.

The curriculum digitization project is granular such that, digitized curriculum data is tied closely to a country, for example, National Curriculum of England National Curriculum for England (Q17016944). The details of this granularity captures data such as local education level, subject, ISCED, etc.

Wikidata is the best platform to host this data. This is a global project that requires everyone to contribute. Wikidata is an international multilingual knowledge base which is open, structured and linked. This feature maintained by the Wikidata project community, serves as an advantage in the language barrier because there will be more contributors on the Wikidata For Education(WD4E) project. Secondly, we want articles on Wikipedia, Wikicommons, WikiVoyage, WikiCommons and other Wiki Sister Projects to benefit from curriculum aligned contents. The WD4E project engages with the Wikidata community to build solutions that make use of the digitized curriculum data. Bots that contribute to articles on other Wiki Sister Projects will benefit from the data from the digitized curriculum to ensure that most articles align with curriculum. This achievement will be a step in the right direction where academia can embrace and fully adopt Wikipedia and it's sister projects as credible educational resource hub.

Using curriculum data for Education/ EdTech apps

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Actions:

Build tools for programmers to access curriculum data
Generate data dumps for use on external platforms

Example use cases:

Comparing learning paths of different states and countries -> Curriculum of Grade 8 from India is teaching these many skills comparing to the same with Bangladesh.
Content creators, content repository administrators, and learning platform developers can use the curriculum standards data to build learning experiences and apps based on the local curriculum structure.

Creating content correlations

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Wikipedia pages, wikibooks, and media resources available in dozens of languages represent a tremendous learning resource covering subjects like math, science, arts, history, languages, an local knowledge. In order to make these learning resources relevant for particular local curriculum standards, we need a way for teachers and other educators to create content correlations that link resources to particular standards. This process is also called "curriculum alignment" (of resources to standards).

Actions:

Add sections of "Relevant resources" to the wikipedia pages for each standard node (see example)
Define Wikidata properties for content correlations
Build tool to link wiki pages (wiki pages and wiki books can be linked to relevant curriculum standards)

Example use cases:

Browse wikipedia resources using the structure of local curriculum standards.
Use the content correlations created on Wikipedia and Wikidata to build an external online educational portal or mobile app (supported by the MoE of the country)
Wikipedia Discussion tab can serve as a discussion forum specific to this specific standard (can be used by teachers and curriculum experts from the MoE).
Export content correlation data to other learning platforms and databases of educational content
Make curriculum data and associated learning resources accessible as standalone offline-friendly learning packs (e.g. ZIM archives to used in Kiwix).

Using curriculum data for a Campaign

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The effort of educators, teachers, and students can be focussed through curriculum campaigns and identification of content correlations for specific subjects and grade levels. Even the largest task can be tackled by splitting it into smaller manageable chunks and rallying the wikipedia community.

Actions:

Identify parts of the curriculum that need to be digitized; split into chunks and use collaborative effort for digitization and data validation
Identify parts of digital curriculum that is missing content correlations and collaboratively add them (add links to existing wikipedia pages or add new pages).

Example use cases:

Improving Wikipedia articles related to curriculum of Ghana on Twi Wikipedia.
Prioritize resources to translate based on their relevance to specific curriculum standards
Create new wikipedia pages to cover gaps

Using curriculum data for research

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Actions:

Educators can identify curriculum crosswalks (equivalencies between curriculum standards in different countries) and encode them in Wikidata

Example use cases:

Reverse analysis on the information gap -> African-American history part of the Oregon curriculum vs African-American history from Oregon on Wikipedia.
Compare and reuse of content correlations developed for one country to rapidly build content correlations for another country (for countries with similar curriculum)

Using curriculum data for GLAM sector

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Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) are sitting on treasure of content that teachers could use as part of their classes. Looking at source artefacts is so much better any stuffy textbook!

Actions:

Link existing artefacts to curriculum standards nodes based on country/epoch/geographic or other metadata

Example use cases:

Cultural heritage institutions align their collection with the curriculum data -> Collection inside Met Museum which align with the curriculum of Kenya

Credible Source for Research in Academia

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An interesting view of how adding curriculum data to Wikidata can move Wikipedia and other sister projects closer to being listed as credible sources of academic referencing.

Actions:

Edits on wikipedia and its sister projects should reference the curriculum data on Wikidata

Example use cases:

When an article is created about the history of Africa or the trans atlantic slave trade, references will be attributed to the curriculum data on Wikidata.

AI Integration: Smart Composition and Curriculum Alignment

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Provide enough data for AI integration that will enable smart composition and curriculum alignment. Since most of the contents on Wikipedia and its sister projects are considered Open Education Resources (OERs), this feature will be useful to have contents align with curriculum standards.

Actions:

Smart bots that trigger automatically on curriculum centric topics
Smart bots that proof read content
Smart bots that display content based on the curriculum standards of the region

Example Use Cases

An integration (can be a specific graphic editor or within this editor) that automatically triggers a bot when a contributor is editing a curriculum related topic.
Contributors will be able to get feedback from bots after their edits if the contents they have entered aligns with curriculum information.
Contributors and viewers can request to show the content based on the jurisdiction they belong