The Case of Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom

In 2019, I was tasked with implementing the learnings from the large scale Wikimedia & education needs assessment I conducted in 2018. Learning that stakeholders (Wikimedia community leaders, volunteers, and education sector stakeholders like educators, school leadership, and advocates) needed more guidance on how to integrate Wikipedia into the curriculum, we knew there was a need for structured training and leadership development. Wikimedia communities wanted to work alongside education sector actors in ways that were meaningful and symbiotic. Our first program targeting these needs was called the Wikimedia and Education Greenhouse, first piloted in 2018. After more listening, and really digging into the barriers to entry for educators, especially in k-12 education where Wikipedia was still very taboo, Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom (RWiC) was born.

RWiCs main premise was to influence secondary school teachers to stop telling students not to use Wikipedia, and instead help them use it as a powerful tool for teaching critical media and information literacy skills. To achieve this monumental task, my team, after consulting with senior leadership at the Wikimedia Foundation, was green-lit with budget to finance diverse community collaboration in the entire process from developing the materials, testing them in diverse contexts, and evaluating their effectiveness. This funding was monumental–it allowed us to collaboratively create a high quality resource that was built from the start in 4 different languages (Arabic, English, Spanish, Tagalog) with guidelines and tools for easy translation and contextualization. The materials, guidelines, and supportive tools and resources allowed the community to adapt the program into more than a dozen new language editions in only 2 years. What’s more—we know the program had a meaningful impact on learning. After participating in the program teachers demonstrated not only understanding of how to incorporate Wikipedia into their lessons, but they reported that they learned from our student-centered approach on how to use those methods in their classroom as well.

So what did financing this project look like?

Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom primarily utilized the institutional model of financing, and as the Wikimedia Foundation itself is a donor financed organization the donor model can also be applied. My team put forward proposals in each year’s annual plan, and crossed our fingers that our program would be funded.

You can find definitions and discussions of various OER funding models in this paper by Stephen Downes, this one by Konko et al (2021), and this one at Encore+.

Our costs

For the pilot, we needed funding to pay for 2 Wikimedia trainers from 3 different communities to work for us part time for 9 months (we ended up extending their contracts). We had small allocations for translation and local outreach. We also used existing internal resources, staff time, software subscriptions, etc. The main budget request in the annual planning process during the pilot was for the contractors. After the pilot, our annual plan requests were for funding to align the design of the materials with the Foundation’s new brand guidelines (the initial design was done in-house by my extremely talented colleague, Vasanthi), a joint request with the Community Development team to pilot WikiLearn, a customized LMS built on EdX, and a request for specialized grants for community implementations and adaptations.

Challenges with institutional funding

Sometimes, it felt like going into battle competing for the scarce resources allocated to community work in an organization that is a tech-company building and maintaining software but also a non-profit grant-making entity that facilitates a global community of volunteers and advocates. Frequent organizational changes made the sustainability of the program volatile. In 2023, leadership decided to no longer fund education support within the foundation. This led to the discontinuation of the small grants program, which funded local adaptations and implementations, as well as the training of trainers program that prepared new leaders to implement the program locally.

These are the risks of the institutional model of funding—it can be easier to get things started if you are able to build your efforts into the annual plan and use existing resources. However, if you are working within an organization that has structures allowing only year to year financing, the sustainability of the program will inevitably suffer.

What can be done?

In 2022, I shared a vision of the future of RWiC that I believed would make it sustainable well into the future. We intended to train more trainers (ToT), fund more local implementations, and, once active trainers had enough experience, support them to implement local ToTs, leading to enhanced stability and sustainability with little internal investment needed outside of grant-making beyond 2025. Ultimately, we weren’t able to fulfill this vision using the institutional funding model we had relied on.

Financial Models vs. Sustainability Models: Paul Stacey recently shared an article examining OER sustainability on paulstacey.global. Stacey emphasizes the need to differentiate between financial models, which focus on generating revenue for OER initiatives, and sustainability models, which encompass a broader perspective. Financial models primarily deal with monetary aspects, while sustainability models ensure the long-term viability, relevance, and impact of OER. Stacey outlines a sustainability formula that looks like this:

Sustainability = high value open resources + public social good + large community of users, partners, collaborators

When I saw this, I immediately thought of Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom. By early 2023, we seemed to have fulfilled the variables that equal sustainability under this model. The resources we produced were high quality, and sought after. The focus on making teachers lives easier by giving them a way to help students use Wikipedia critically, provided public social good by enhancing digital and information literacy skills, and even leading to teachers getting involved in their local Wikimedia communities. There were trained RWiC certified trainers in more than 30 countries, and funded local implementations in places as diverse as Ukraine, Nigeria, and Yemen. We had more demand for training than we could meet, with the call for applications for our final cohort of trainers receiving hundreds of applications for only 30 spots. We had demand for training from school districts and ministries of education—as long as we funded it. And there’s the catch with this model of funding. If anything disrupts the ability of the OER’s community to continue using institutional resources, the sustainability of the program is at serious risk.

Considering this, it will be interesting to watch if and how RWiC lives on without relying on institutional funding. There are still trained trainers all over the world who are passionate about the program and want to continue implementing it. To this day, Wikimedians reach out to me requesting to be trained on the program. The resources are still freely available. It could be a good case study to look at the application of the sustainability formula. I would love to see RWiC continue to make a positive impact on the world, and I hope by sharing my own wins and setbacks funding OER you have a better idea of what might work for you.

What do you think? Have you seen successful examples of this sustainability formula in practice? What funding models have you seen succeed or fail, and what caused it?

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