User:Phoebe/course wizard/Course description

A freshman biology seminar that is intended as a brief introduction to research in the biological sciences. The UC Davis freshman College of Biology class (~1200 students) is divided into six cohorts, two cohorts per quarter, that all receive the same material in a one credit course: lectures from faculty about their research, an introduction to the college, and an introduction to using the library and finding scientific literature. As part of the library assignment, in 2014-2015 instructors are experimenting with adding a Wikipedia editing assignment.

The assignment consists of finding a scientific article in the Biosis database (subscription resource) about an organism that has a stub article in Wikipedia, and adding that article citation in a 'further reading' section, using the cite journal template (from the citation toolbar). They need to create the further reading section if one does not exist already, and not duplicate existing citations.

We've given the students very detailed information about each step and are offering office-hour support. For this small edit, we are not requiring creating an account to save an extra step. We are supplying them with a list of pre-vetted stub articles; the list of articles for Winter 2015 is here and changes can be tracked via related changes. user:phoebe and user:Quercusechinus, the librarians for this course, are both Wikipedians and are committed to cleaning up any mistakes, as well optimizing the directions to minimize bad edits. We see this as an experiment in large-scale minor editing, and want to see if it's possible to follow a different pedagogic model from intensive hands-on work on a single article to a smaller project that also relates to information literacy outcomes (and improves a large number of rarely-edited stubs).

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