Virtual Learning Environment making good progress

We’re in the process of developing a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) to support teaching new editors how to edit Wikipedia. This will be a particularly useful resource for those training new editors, such as those people who have progressed through our Training the Trainers programme  Work is progressing well, so now seems like a useful time to provide an update.

The system has been built using the open source platform Moodle, which is especially popular among universities, colleges and professionals with an interest in the field of continuous professional development. Moodle allows for bespoke course structures to be designed by those creating and teaching the course. Much thought was given to the structure and design of the course and we’ve taken an approach which breaks down the content into three distinct levels. For now, we’ll call these Level A, Level B and Level C.

Level A is the level for absolute beginners and will cover the basics, such as what Wikipedia is and how it works. Level B is the intermediate level and touches on some of the finer points of editing and also looks at some of the principles of Wikipedia in more detail. Level C is for more advanced users of Wikipedia. As well as the three main levels of the course, over time a database of case studies will evolve and serve as a vehicle for further study.

Much of the structure of the course and its written content has been completed and will soon be ready for testing. There are areas of work which remain ongoing, such as the implementation of a theme to improve the system’s accessibility and look & feel. A companion manual which provides course instructions and other useful resources is also currently in development. We’re also investigating ways of writing a modification to Moodle to allow HTML to be imported from wiki pages to directly, providing a transclusion function.

We’ll share more information about the VLE as work progresses further.