Wikipedia in African Libraries Course: Call for participants for pilot testing

3RD NOVEMBER, 2020

As the COVID-19 crisis drives teaching, learning and other engagements onto online spaces, librarians as information professionals need to have more skills and understanding of how to be active digital citizens and information managers in collaborative online spaces. The Wikipedia in African Libraries course which is an adaptation of the OCLC Libraries + Wikipedia Better Together curriculum is primarily designed to train African librarians to work in an online platform as they learn how to evaluate the quality and reliability of individual articles, edit and create content of local and personal interest on Wikipedia and sister projects with laid down benchmarks for quality and relevance. The course will also equip librarians with the knowledge and skills to understand Wikipedia as a veritable resource for dissemination of information and a teaching tool that promotes quality education thereby increasing access to the resource and serving user communities all over Africa, better.

Importantly, the course will expose African librarians to how they can teach their user communities to effectively use Wikipedia by taking them through the editorial processes and quality standards of the platform. As part of the online training, librarians will be encouraged and supported to physically run Wikipedia programmes in their libraries as community projects or assignments applying what was taught. This would present great opportunities for communities all over the continent to tell their stories by themselves on a very visible global platform thus increasing the volume of information about Africa – our heroes and heroines, our meanings and philosophies that is integrated into the global body of knowledge. The course will also nurture relationships between Wikipedia communities in Africa with libraries. This is expected to lead to collaborations with librarians during and after the life-cycle of the project.

There are three (3) windows of opportunity for Librarians to participate in this course. The course will admit 2 Cohorts from February to April, 2021 (Cohort 1) and May – July, 2021 (Cohort 2). Before this, there is need for selected number of Librarians to test the adapted curriculum.

AfLIA, therefore calls for pilot participants to test the Wikipedia in African Libraries (#WikiAfLibs) course. The pilot cohort will help test the adapted OCLC curriculum from 16th November – 20th December, 2020. The course will;

• equip librarians with the knowledge and skills to understand Wikipedia as a veritable resource for dissemination of information and a teaching tool that promotes quality education thereby increasing access to the resource and serving their user communities better.
• train African librarians on how to evaluate the quality and reliability of individual articles, edit and create content of local and personal interest on Wikipedia and sister projects with laid down benchmarks for quality and relevance
• lead librarians into understanding how to be active digital citizens and information professionals in collaborative online spaces.

Registration

The course is open and free for African Librarians in all library types.

If you wish to be a pilot participant to test the Wikipedia in African Libraries course, please click button below.

Successful applicants will be notified on or before 15th November, 2020.
The call is open until 13th November, 2020.