Wikiversity:Creating a lesson plan

Creating a Lesson Plan

It is simple and easy to start or create a lesson plan at Wikiversity. This procedure is only one suggested starting point. Please modify it to express or try out your own ideas. Detailed instructions on how to write a lesson plan are available at Humboldt.[1] Further information packets are available at the search service ask.com[2] and/or at google[3].

Traditional Approach

1. Identify what you wish the participant to be able to learn from the lesson. This is often called the objective of the lesson.

Keep in mind the early participant's objectives may differ from your own, so they may fork and modify the material liberally. If newcomers seem to be disrupting your development it may be appropriate to suggest they forkWikiversity:Productive_Forking_and_Tailoring_is_Encouraged to a different Wikiversity location to pursue different objectives or styles of presentation or development. Alternatively, it is often less vexing to slip away quietly to your own fork, after all, we do not own pages we initiate here. Anyone is welcome to attempt to improve them.

2. Gather some initial material which can be presented to the student. Currently, at Wikiversity this includes text, pictures, and links which are easy to upload and add to the wiki page presentation database.

An excellent general starting point can be either http://wikipedia.org or http://wikibooks.org; both have good information and links to excellent information elsewhere. There is a search utility available at both sites or one can use the layers lists of subject/category links available from the front page.

A keyword search at www.google.com or some other search engine can also be very helpful.

3. Write an initial quiz and answer sheet.

4. Add an appropriate link within the existing Wikiversity hierarchy, so participants can find your material when it is of potential interest to them.

5. Add appropriate link infrastructure to place the material properly, if necessary.

6. If the initial materials seem to disappear while you are working try using the search features to find it. Someone may have assisted you by moving the material to an existing page or changing the name. If they have been mistakenly deleted as abandoned cruft, an administrator can usually undelete them for you. Local backups under your own control are always a good investment when working with large data projects. With simple stuff like paragraphs or lesson plans or links it is often easier to just recreate an improved version.

7. Add the page or its discussion page to your watchlist to make it easy to check back occasionally to answer questions or improve the material if that is your wish. This is not required. Eventually the material will be improved, forked, or pruned from the Wikiversity site unless it becomes very polished and merely archived. That is the nature of our current wiki process developed at Wikipedia and the starting point for Wikiversity's evolution.

A Random Walk on the Wild Side

1. Read a random page at Wikipedia w:Special:Random or start at a random book module at Wikibooks b:Special:Random, it will often have a layered set of links to help find a chapter, section, concept, or paragraph of interest.

2. Create a quick, concise, subject quiz using a local text editor. Include the links to the original source material at the top. Include the answers at the bottom or better yet plan to cut and paste answers to the quiz discussion page.

3. Find an appropriate place in Wikiversity learning trails, course lists, portal indexes, etc. to place the initial page link.

4. Create the page.

5. Find a few more places to link into (fan in from) the new quiz. Programmers will recognize that we are fanning out from the entry points along the learning trails and then fanning back into specific material from multiple locations.

6. Feedback loop. If interested, place the new page on your watchlist to see if it attracts interest, modification, and maintenance sufficient to prosper and mature into a brilliant polished often used resource.

Online Quizzes and Review Questions

There is useful example HTML at this Wikipedia article w:Seven_Bridges_of_Königsberg, and here on Wikiversity at Test and Quiz, demonstrating how to hide the answers to a question until the student decides they are ready for them.