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Wikidata for Education

Aligning the sum of all knowledge with

school curricula

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Context

In 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic made it dangerous for children and teachers to attend school in a face to face environment. Distance learning became a necessity. At the same time, education systems were unprepared to seamlessly shift to online learning. Besides a lack of technological infrastructure, worldwide we were unprepared to take advantage of the opportunities present in open educational resources and the semantic web to support the continuation of learning during this unprecedented crisis.

In the wake of the UNESCO recommendation on the use of Open Education Resources, and in the framework of the UNESCO Global Coalition for the response to COVID-19 in Education, the Wikimedia Foundation proposes to build capacity in education systems to make data about curriculum open, and include it in Wikidata so that aligned open educational resources can be easily found, adapted and used by teachers, students and caregivers.

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Wikimedia logo family logo 2 by User:Otourly under CC-BY-SA 3.0

Our Ecosystem

of Free Knowledge

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What is Wikidata?

Wikidata is a free and open knowledge database that can be read and edited by both humans and machines.

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Wikidata is structured data

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Wikidata is structured data

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Wikidata is structured data

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Wikidata is structured data

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Wikidata is also linked data!

Q

P

Items

Properties

[numbers]

Values

followed by

Every item has a unique identifier (a Q number). A property with a unique number connects one item of data to another item of data

All are open, available, and connected in 300+ languages!

Michael Essien

Q959620

Ghana

Q117

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Wikidata makes it possible for both humans and computers to make sense of information and to bring us different pieces of relevant information automatically.

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Making it possible to improve the accessibility and quality of Open Educational Resources as demonstrated by these 4 use cases

Support the Wikimedia volunteer editing community to improve content related to school curricula

Create an education portal with curated content from the Wikimedia projects and other open education resources that is aligned with school curricula

Give education stakeholders the ability to do comparative analysis of curricula on a global scale.

Make data about curricula readily available and machine readable so that developers can create innovative solutions to education challenges

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Wikidata includes subjects covered in curricula, but data about curricula

is missing

“Give me a list of all mountains in Ghana”

“Give me a list of topics in Science for 5th graders in Ghana”

Ghana

Q117

Mountains

Q8502

Result

?

Structured and linked

Result

Ghana

Q117

NOT structured

and linked

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Curriculum topics

P8263

Central Board of Secondary Education

(India)

Q3347350

In the studies of

P2578

History

of West Africa

Q5867197

Alabama K-12 Education

Q1151386

Ashanti People

Q457341

What structured and linked topics in a curriculum might look like

Ghana Curriculum for Primary School

Q….?

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Curriculum information as structured data

B2.2.1.1. Show understanding of the

characteristics of some of the ethnic groups in Ghana

Missing Wikidata items:

Ghana national curriculum
National Council for Curriculum and Assessment

Akan Art

(Q4700245)

Education in Ghana (Q861546)

Curriculum

Topics

P8263

How do we structure curriculum data?

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There are unlimited applications for the data once it’s included in Wikidata

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Data Modeling

WD4E has been generously funded by the Wikimedia Foundation and is currently being implemented by the Ghana Society for Technology in Education, Open Foundation West Africa, and Wikimedia Ghana with support from UNESCO UNESCO IBE, Ghana’s National Association for Curriculum and Assessment NaCCA, and the Ghana Library Authority.

Where are we now?

Closing knowledge gaps related to school curricula

Teacher training

Hackathon

Publish white paper w/UNESCO IBE

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Credits and Attributions

Chart by UN Women - https://interactive.unwomen.org/multimedia/explainer/covid19/en/index.html, CC BY-SA 3.0-igo
Michael Essien photograph by Ultraslansi - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25538886
Adaklu Mountain by Selorm18 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79269853
Ashanti yam Ceremony by Thomas E. Bowdich - Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (London, 1819), between pp. 274 and 275 (reprinted Frank Cass, 1966)., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4800191
Flag of Ghana, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=343073
Figurative goldweight By Mesobones (talk) - self-made, CC BY 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16818275

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Thank you!