SoilWeb200 and Wikipedia: Leveraging Open Resources for Active Student Learning and Soil Science Knowledge Dissemination.

SoilWeb200 (http://soilweb200.landfood.ubc.ca/ ) was developed in 2003 as a multimedia educational resource to support the University of British Columbia’s (UBC’s) Introduction to Soil Science course. In 2014, it underwent updates to migrate its content to an open publishing platform, UBC Wiki. SoilWeb200 has been utilized in numerous courses across Canada and internationally, engaging about 2,000 students/year. While the current use is strong, the next phase will capitalize on opportunities to involve students directly with SoilWeb200 by incorporating student-generated content to enhance this flexible educational resource. This is an active learning strategy we are experimenting with to engage students with soil science, and promote knowledge distribution through integration with widely used resources such as Wikipedia, which has become a teaching tool in many post-secondary classes. The objective of our ongoing project is to augment the use of SoilWeb200 with open pedagogies that allow authentic knowledge creation and encourage students to connect course content with real-world applications. To achieve the objective, the following two major components are developed: (1) student projects involving the curation and posting of current events and news articles with a critical review of their relevance in the Introduction to Soil Science course and (2) reflective student projects to propose improvements, additions, and possible integration points between the SoilWeb200 content and soil science content on Wikipedia. In addition, we ae planning to organize a coordinated event “Soil Science Edit-a-Thon” on World Soil Day, December 5, 2017, as a celebration of the International Decade of Soils (2015-2024). The project will provide active learning opportunities by creating the technical infrastructure for students to explore the relevance of soil in a variety of global issues (food security, climate change, biodiversity, air and water pollution), which will continue to ensure long-term usability of SoilWeb200 in soil science education.