Wikipedia:GLAM/Coventry University/Report

This is a report of Coventry University's Wikimedian In Residence, a residency that ran from May 2019 to May 2021.

Background
The Disruptive Media Learning Lab (DMLL) is a unit within Coventry University that has a cross-university remit to foster innovative forms of teaching and learning. Led by Jonathan Shaw, the team educational innovation specialists worked with 31 courses and more than 3,000 students between 2014 and 2017. They are positioned to be able to work with the whole of the university, and bring about changes within how courses are taught.

The DMLL took its first steps into world of Wikimedia in mid-2016. At this stage they were considering a Wikimedian in Residence, inspired by the work of the University of Edinburgh, who began hosting such a project in 2015. Discussions around how a residency could work began, covering aspects of teaching and sharing content from the Lanchester Interactive Archive, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The Archive contains more than 20,000 items related to Frederick Lanchester; when recruiting an outreach worker in late 2016, and included experience with Wikimedia/Wikipedia editing as one of the advantageous criteria.

Discussions continued between WMUK and the DMLL, leading to the creating of a residency in 2019. An agreement between the two organisations was signed and recruitment began in April that year. The residency was planned to last for two years, with the resident based at the DMLL and working part-time (0.5FTE). the post was funded by DMLL, line managed by Daniel Villar-Onruiba and based at the DMLL’s offices in the Frederick Lanchester Library. Andy Mabbett was selected as resident and began in post in May 2019.

The main goals of residency were: During the residency there were key events which shaped its direction, namely building towards Coventry’s status as City of Culture between 2021 and 2025; the development of the Curriculum 2025 initiative to develop teaching within the University and improve sustainability; the Covid-19 pandemic which meant that teaching moved online.
 * 1) to work towards the improvement of quality of Wikimedia project's content, particularly relating to the collections and content of University and local communities
 * 2) to promote student, staff, and community digital engagement
 * 3) to provide training opportunities for staff, students, and the public
 * 4) to facilitate knowledge exchange and co-creation between staff, students, and the Wikimedia community
 * 5) to facilitate content releases of information and materials held by the University

Distinctive things about this residency
Strengths


 * Coventry University has 27,000 students and nearly 2,000 academic staff. This represents a large potential group who can contribute their knowledge and time to improving open knowledge. The DMLL's position as a cross-university unit means it is well positioned to bring about positive change within classroom courses and introduce Wikimedia skills.
 * The university has strong civic links, meaning the are opportunities to add value to outreach activities. Coventry is UK City of Culture between 2021 and 2025 and activities to enhance these links between the university and the city were considered.
 * The residency has a focus on digital fluency, enhancing the skills of students and staff. Understanding how Wikimedia works and its role in knowledge production improves information skills, therefore this was a good fit for the residency.
 * Driving forward decolonisation agenda through curriculum 2025
 * The university hosts the Lanchester Archive, containing items relating to Frederick Lanchester, a polymath with strong links to the city.

Barriers


 * The biggest challenge during the residency was the start of the Covid 19 pandemic. This necessitated the suspension of face-to-face teaching across the university in mid-March. The lack of face-to-face interactions and discussions was an additional challenge to encouraging course leaders to use Wikimedia in the classroom. At a time of increased workloads due to the need to convert curricula to online delivery, there may have been a reluctance to add additional workload by adopting a new method and using Wikimedia in the classroom. The pandemic led to considerable change across the higher education sector; many of the education courses WMUK supports outside WIRs programmes were postponed or cancelled, with staff needed to redirect their teaching.
 * A recurring issue was that of low turnout at events, sometimes less than half of those who registered. This pre-dated the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, but it exacerbated the situation.
 * Modifying courses to use Wikimedia engagement is assessment is a time-consuming process and a there is a long lead time needed for planning, review, and approval. The resident made good use of regular training sessions for staff and students to bridge this gap and offer ways for people to become more familiar with Wikimedia.

Key statistics and events delivered

 * 95 user names recorded, of which 92 were new users
 * An additional 29 editors were involved, but user names not collected
 * The new editors trained through the residency made 946 edits, contributing 213,200 bytes of text, creating 24 articles and 28 Wikidata items, and improving a further 89 articles and 42 Wikidata items.
 * 196 files uploaded by the WIR related to the residency, viewed 83,000 times in June 2021
 * 436 attendees total, from hands-on events, workshops about working with Wikimedia that did not involve editing, and from presentations at events
 * New Wikiquote entry created for Frederick W. Lanchester
 * 2 transcription projects set up on Wikisource

Influencing policy and sharing content
One of the aims of the project was to facilitate content releases of information and materials held by the University. As a research institution, the university has taken steps to share information through its institutional repository and the residency was an opportunity to drive conversations around the use of open licences and demonstrate how open knowledge can benefit students and staff by removing barriers to access.

To this end, the WIR undertook discussions with various stakeholders around licensing. In late 2019, the WIR advised maths educators about releasing educational resources under an open licence. This was followed by other discussions with university staff about releasing media from the university's collections under an open licence, taking the extra step from making information available online to ensuring it becomes open knowledge and ensuring it can be freely used and reused.

The university's role as a civic institution meant that the WIR was able to use their position to help other organisations become more open. The WIR prepared a briefing paper for Coventry Digital about open licensing for media related to Coventry's City of Culture status, and resulted in moves to include open licensing in the media repository.

Impact across the university


The WIR proactively sought to release multimedia from the university. He recorded audio clips of several members of staff and affiliates of the university, using them to enhance their Wikipedia pages. He also approached the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, persuaded them to use open licences on their YouTube channel, and then uploaded the videos to Commons. Looking to enhance the work of the Lanchester Archive, the WIR also began a transcription project of one of Frederick Lanchester's works, Aerodynamics.

The WIR trained the university's librarians in their key role supporting students in finding information. This also involved introductions to #1Lib1Ref in 2020 and 2021. As well as running training sessions for staff and students, the WIR explored a number of options for using Wikipedia in the classroom. He contributed lectures to modules on 'The Informed Citizen in the Digital Age' and 'Finding and Evaluating Information'. With Daniel Villar-Onrubia, Andy Mabbett developed a module using Wikipedia editing as part of evaluation, which would have been a first for the university. The module was approved and planned to run at the start of the 2020/21 academic year but was cancelled due to low uptake. Whether modules run is always a matter of attracting enough students to the subject, and it may have been a different situation outside of a pandemic. The WIR was also due to support a module in 2020/21 on overseas business practice, which would have brought a diverse element to the editing, but there was a reversal of the decision to involve Wikimedia editing.

In 2021, the project secured funding to hire 'Wikimedia Ambassadors' (paid student interns) to help with the delivery of events. This was an important step in increasing the capacity of the project, and establishing a structured way for students to enhance their own event organisation skills in a Wikimedia-related situation.

Beyond the University


In February 2020, the DMLL hosted the Wikimedia in Education Summit as a satellite event of the Open Education Resources conference in April. It was an opportunity for course leaders currently using Wikimedia in the classroom to share best practice, and for others to learn about how they can use Wikimedia as a learning resources. By hosting the event, the DMLL was able to play a crucial role in knowledge exchange, strengthening the role of Wikimedian in higher education.

In September 2020, there emerged the opportunity to apply to Erasmus+ for a grant supporting Digital Education Readiness, responding directly to the Covid-19 pandemic. DMLL and WMUK collaborated on an application to fund work on wiki-editing for learning. While the application could not be completed due to the tight deadline, WMUK and Coventry worked with the University of Porto, the University of Granada, the University of Cologne, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, and the University of Tartu, putting Wikimedia editing on their agenda.

The Covid-19 pandemic meant that much of the activities related to the residency were focused on either the University itself or partnerships, such as in relation to the Coventry City of Culture status. In May 2021, the WIR organised 'Coventrypedia', a series of public editing events themed around the city as part of the City of Culture programme. The event was publicised by the local press.