Annual Plan for Fiscal Year 2017–2018
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Wiki Education Foundation 2017–18 Annual Plan Table of Contents Looking back: 2016–17 Summary of 2016–17 Performance Activities, Goals, and Targets Core Programs Program Support Research and Academic Engagement Revenue, Expenses, and Staffing Looking ahead: the 2017–18 Plan Overview Key Initiatives in 2017–18 Activities, Goals, and Targets Core Programs Program Support Research and Academic Engagement Strategic planning for 2017–2020 Revenue, Expenses, and Staffing Board Resolution Appendix Risks considered in developing the 2017–18 plan 1 Looking back: 2016–17 Summary of 2016–17 Performance 2016–17 has been our third year as an organization. Despite operating on a reduced budget, we were able to significantly increase our programmatic impact in the areas of student learning and adding quality content to Wikipedia. With regards to our mission, the past year has been the most successful to date. At the end of 2016, our Year of Science initiative culminated with more than 6,300 students engaged in improving the English Wikipedia’s underdeveloped science content while improving their writing, information literacy, critical thinking, collaboration, and online communications skills. The science students enrolled in our Classroom Program created 637 articles and improved more than 5,670. These articles have provided more than 300 million Wikipedia readers around the globe with free access to high-quality science information in 2016 alone. During the most active time of the year, we produced almost 6% of all science content on the English Wikipedia. Our Year of Science initiative has been so successful that volunteers in Brazil are gearing up for a similar initiative on the Portuguese Wikipedia in 2018. At the same time, with more than 65% of the students being female, our Classroom Program continues to be single most effective tool for boosting women’s authorship on the English Wikipedia. Students in women’s studies courses have contributed content that balances the representation on Wikipedia, where the highest-quality biographies are more frequently accounts of men’s lives and achievements. Students have contributed articles about notable female scientists, public health advocates, philosophers, psychologists, and screenwriters. Preparing students for their future careers is a top priority in higher education today. In order to gain a better understanding of the employability skills developed through Wikipedia assignments, we launched a large-scale research study in 2016. Preliminary results show that 86% of our students thought a Wikipedia assignment was as or more valuable for developing critical thinking skills than a traditional assignment. 95% of students enrolled in our Classroom Program thought Wikipedia assignments were as good or better for improving their digital literacy and nearly 70% thought it was more valuable. 94% said the Wikipedia assignment was as or more valuable for learning about the reliability of online sources, 63% said it was more or much more valuable. 2 All of this has been made possible through the support of our funders, our highly motivated staff, the personal commitment of our board, and a positive relationship with Wikipedia’s community of longtime contributors. Activities, Goals, and Targets Our 2016–17 Annual Plan outlined specific activities, goals, and targets in three main areas: Core Programs; Program Support; and Research and Academic Engagement. We’ll report our work on each of these areas individually. Core Programs Goal: Recruit participating Classroom Program instructors and Visiting Scholar hosts High-level view: Further improving the effectiveness of our recruitment efforts The increasing demand in our services is a strong indicator that we’re already doing many things right when it comes to recruiting new instructors to our programs. Over the course of the past fiscal year, we have learned that outreach webinars, partnerships with academic associations, booths at conferences, campus visits, and efforts to improve our organization’s overall visibility are effective drivers of growth, while edit-a-thons are not. In the future, we will continue our data-driven approach and also closely watch emerging trends like recruitment through word-of-mouth and increased visibility (organic growth). The focus of the Educational Partnerships and Outreach team was to increase the visibility of teaching with Wikipedia in Wiki Ed’s programs through on-campus presentations, academic association partnerships, and webinars, with a special focus on Year of Science disciplines. We continued our data-driven approach to recruiting new instructors and new Visiting Scholars host institutions, while innovating around new types of partnerships. Following is a report on the activities outlined in last year’s plan. 3 ● Host regular professional webinars about teaching with Wikipedia to recruit new program participants, or to encourage existing program participants to champion our program to their colleagues. ○ To date, we have hosted 9 outreach webinars with 468 attending instructors. Classroom Program instructors hosted us remotely to share our expertise and recruit their colleagues into the program. In this fiscal year, 11 courses in the Classroom Program were recruited from webinars run during the same time period. We’ve learned that tapping into existing program participants’ networks enables us to get webinar attendees without spending any financial resources and with very little staff time beyond the presentations. We’ve found these virtual presentations are highly cost effective and will continue using them to recruit program participants. ● Establish partnerships with academic associations to promote the use of Wikipedia as a teaching tool in higher education classrooms within that discipline. ○ In FY 2016–17, we started a new partnership with the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). With the focus on the Year of Science in the first half of the year, we shifted away from formal partnerships in order to achieve short-term goals related to the campaign. We succeeded in our short-range goals thanks to our shift in activities, but at the expense of long- range goals that formal partnerships help us achieve. With a focus on maintaining current programmatic activities in the coming fiscal year, we will refocus on developing new partnerships to ensure long-term growth. During the year, however, engaging with current partners and sustaining their Wikipedia initiatives allowed us to target those disciplines and strengthen those relationships. ● Attend academic association conferences and do campus visits to promote the use of Wikipedia as a teaching tool and the Visiting Scholars program, with a focus on Year of Science recruitment for the fall 2016 term. ○ For FY 2016–17, we participated in the following 30 in-person events for outreach opportunities: ● American Society of Plant Biologists Annual Meeting, July 2016 ● The Allied Genetics Conference, July 2016 ● Botany 2016, August 2016 ● Joint Statistics Meeting, August 2016 ● MathFest, August 2016 4 ● Ecological Society of America Conference, August 2016 ● American Chemical Society Fall Meeting, August 2016 ● University of Mississippi campus visit, September 2016 ● Puente Community College Program workshop, October 2016 ● University of California, San Diego campus visit, October 2016 ● National Women Studies Association annual meeting, November 2016 ● American Anthropological Association annual meeting, November 2016 ● American Geophysical Union annual meeting, December 2016 ● American Historical Association annual meeting, January 2017 ● Linguistic Society of America annual meeting, January 2017 ● American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, February 2017 ● NWSA Regional Meeting, March 2017 ● University of California, Berkeley Campus Visit, March 2017 ● Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences annual meeting, March 2017 ● Scholarship of Teaching and Learning conference, March 2017 ● American Society for Environmental History conference, March 2017 ● California State University, East Bay campus visit, March 2017 ● American Chemical Society Spring Meeting, April 2017 ● Association for Women in Mathematics Research Symposium, April 2017 ● York University campus visit, April 2017 ● Xavier University campus visit, May 2017 ● Tulane University campus visit, May 2017 ● Louisiana State University CxC Summer Institute campus visit, May 2017 ● Fordham University campus visit, May 2017 ● American Society of Plant Biologists annual meeting, June 2017 ○ Of the conferences where Wiki Ed staff presented and recruited new program participants, 15 were specifically related to Year of Science disciplines. At these events, we gave talks about the pedagogical benefit of editing Wikipedia as a classroom assignment, spoke to conference attendees at exhibit booths, and ran workshops to design Wikipedia assignments. 5 ○ From these events so far, we have recruited 46 courses into the Classroom Program. While outreach events result in new courses the first term following the event, they are even more productive the second term, after we’ve spent several months cultivating the instructor and helping them design their assignment to fit their personal course objectives. ○ When we recruit instructors at STEM conferences, it takes more time to convert them into an active course in the Classroom Program. We believe this is because fewer STEM courses offer existing writing assignments compared to those in the humanities, but many of the science disciplines are