Verksamhetsberättelse 2020/Story: Creating a modular educational structure

Enabling

2020

In this Story we are focusing on the process of developing training modules to educate members, staff and volunteers. This modular educational structure will both make it easier for people to join our organization and the Wikimedia movement, and for us to more efficiently train more people than ever before.

A core focus for Wikimedia Sverige, as well as for the Wikimedia movement, is capacity building. Internally, as well as externally. The situation following the COVID-19 pandemic made it very clear that we cannot depend on physical events for education and training, but have to create great educational material for online consumption.

Therefore, we set out to create a new educational system to function across our entire organization, providing possibilities for both internal and external training. A set of modules were created, that can be adapted and combined into different sets of courses.

A challenge following this work is which online platform to choose, that can satisfy the needs for both pedagogical and ideological goals. In 2020, the first drafts of courses were created using the Programs and Events Dashboard, using both our own material and the training modules provided by the platform. However, the platform does not fulfill all the needs of the organization, and the final platform is yet to be decided. One aspect of that is if we should also implement a Learning Management System, keeping track of the participants and statistics that take our training.

The content of all our courses will be closely knit to almost every part of the organization. From how to educate a new member on what we do and who we are, to a volunteer interested in Wikimedia Commons and copyright, to a group of librarians participating in #1lib1ref, to someone looking for an instruction video on how to edit Wikipedia.

As the Wikimedia Sverige fundraising work was upscaled during 2020, four new employees were hired to conduct Face2face fundraising. These employees had an onboarding program developed specifically for them, formulating new educational materials for newly hired. A handbook was created as a part of this training, containing new aspects of our organizational work such as how to handle hatred or violence in our working environment.

An important aspect of this training material was how to formulate what was taught, as the employees themselves were going to communicate the essence of the organization without having been a part of it before. This was an excellent opportunity to find the core of who we are and teaching it to others. It might be a little difficult to boil down what we do to its core, and this was helpful in that aspect.

Through the work in 2020 a foundation now exists for our modular educational approach and we are getting ready to put it to the test with new volunteers, interns and staff in the coming year. This strategy will also be an integral part of our planned training across the movement around different aspects of content partnerships as well as in Sweden where we need to provide a solid foundation for volunteers joining our organization working on different things, in different parts of the country.