Leveraging Wikipedia in First Year Experience Courses
April Gaddis and Caitlin Richardson
Miami Dade College
The first year of a student’s higher education experience is an integral time to learn skills and build habits that will support students on their path to a degree. Student success at Miami Dade College is the priority of every student contact interaction both in and outside of the classroom. With this strategic priority in mind, the Miami Dade College (MDC) Hialeah Campus Library (Learning Resources) developed a plan to engage and further student success through a high impact learning project.
A review of students by faculty members and librarians found that many incoming students lacked crucial writing, research, and academic technology skills. A partnership formed with First Year Experience (FYE) teaching SLS1106 faculty and the campus library to focus on these skills by designing an inclusive curriculum that would impact student learning. The main objectives for the project include:
SLS1106 is a natural fit as the course focuses on topics that set the groundwork for students to be successful in the academic world including critical thinking, study skills, and decision making. By adding a technological, research, and writing component, students take an active role in the topics by contextualizing the course material and creating content that will be distributed to a wide audience.
Wikipedia, while still considered taboo in some academic arenas, serves as an ideal tool to teach students the importance of information literacy and to value the writing they create. When used to deliver information literacy instruction, Wikipedia has the potential to expose students to each of the six frames of the ACRL framework.
This Wikipedia project is designed to expose students to the power of information literacy and equip them with the boldness necessary to be Wikipedia contributors. In partnership with the campus library, FYE instructor, and Wikipedia Education Foundation, a curriculum is designed to help students develop essential transferable skills required to properly research, evaluate, access, and contribute information in a real-world capacity, on a global scale.
Students enrolled in the SLS1106 course are divided into groups of four to six to edit, improve, and create articles related to the course topics. For the entire eight week course, students participate in multiple Wikipedia trainings meet with a librarian once a week in order to scaffold information literacy skills and to show students how to use Wikipedia as a reliable and timely source for academic purposes. Frequent writing is a major component of this project. Throughout the course, students document their experiences as Wikipedia editors via blogs. Students are required, via the training modules, to familiarize themselves with the writing format of Wikipedia. Students are empowered by contributing to Wikipedia and seeing their work “published”, which leads to positive writing habits that will carry over to other courses.