Grants talk:Project/Orgio89/Offline Wikipedia outreach in Mongolia/Midpoint

Report accepted

Hi Orgio89. Thank you for this detailed and informative midpoint report. It's great to hear that the project is going well so far and that you have been able to manage both the opportunities and challenges that have come up. We have a few comments/questions about the report and look forward to your responses.

1. You noted that you've realized local district libraries are one of the key players to reach your goals of developing more readers and prospective editors of the local Mongolian Wikipedia. Partnering with libraries and librarians is very strategic and we've seen great partnerships develop in many places around the world. Librarians are uniquely placed to support people with research, finding good resources, and supporting the culture of contributing to free knowledge. If you'd like us to share more about our experiences partnering with librarians, we are happy to do so!
2. The report mentions that "nearly 15% of students access Wikipedia to do their homework which provides very encouraging perspective for our project solutions possibilities". Is this statistic from before you shared the dvds or do 15% of students now access Wikipedia since distributing the dvds? And if before, were they accessing Wikipedia online or offline?
3. What kind of access to internet do students currently have? How much do they use internet research to complete their schoolwork? In your next steps you talk about starting to do some editing training. We assume this is only possible in the schools that have internet connection.
4. One of the main challenges you raised was the short-term interest students have in the project and passive learning attitude. This is a systemic problem that we imagine is very difficult to address. What are your thoughts about how to continue to engage the students?
5. It's wonderful to hear that well planned, engaging and content-rich Wikipedia-based lessons are working well. How are these lessons being developed? In partnership between teachers and your NGO? How long do the lessons take to be developed? We understand this process will be documented as part of the proposal to the Ministry of Education and look forward to learning more.
6. In terms of requesting additional funding for continuing the project, it would be great to talk through your ideas over a call. I know we tried to schedule one, but I have been delayed in following up. Apologies! I will respond and look forward to talking soon.

This midpoint report is approved and we will move forward with sending the second half of the funding. Best, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 02:55, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

Reply:

1. Yes any of your previous library cooperation information, reports, web links will be greatly helpful for our project development and implementation.
2. That 15% access rate is before the DVD distribution. And the students accessed Wikipedia online. Those school areas are highly diverse in terms of internet access rate that in some areas it is 90% not internet accessed and in some better areas 50% or more internet accessed. However in recent years many local banks released their 3G service based mobile banking services and the local government statistics use that banking access numbers as official internet access rate and they publish some big number of internet access rate such as 1.8 million people accessed to the internet compare to total 3.1 million population.
3. The most students use some free public wifi services to access internet through their smartphone despite 10-50% use their home dsl internet depending on different income level areas. Our guidebook will be clear enough for students to learn the Wikipedia editing basics without internet connection.
4. This pilot project is enabling us to gather important real situation information and to develop effective solutions alternatives and we are right in the middle of processing whole thing. Since our Wikipedia DVD launching is successful with local educational community we will be launching suitable effective countermeasures for the current trends that some ways percieve as a challange but possibly an opportunity to re-adjust our solutions development.
5. The lessons are developed for current study phase of particular grades by professional english teacher who is officially hired by our project and who is one of top qualified with multiple teaching awards. The lessons took two months to develop with additional several teachers certain helps in some parts of development. The lessons are being all on site researched through local teaching process study sheet with our project staffs and multiple photos and videos were taken during the process.
6. Yes let's meet through previous way. Orgio89, 05/10/2017, 8:12am. (ULAT)