Wikidata for Education Technical Advisor
Job Title: Wikidata for Education Technical Advisor
Type of role: Part time consultant
Length of Contract: ASAP-Dec 30, 2022
Location: Accra, Ghana/ Remote
How to Apply: wikimedia@g-set.org
Summary
Ghana Society for Education Technology (GSET) is looking for a Technical Advisor to join our team, reporting to the Director of Strategy & Innovation. As the Technical Advisor, you will be responsible for providing consultation to the WD4E team and working group on processes and tools for structured data extraction and data modeling, ensuring replicability of the work across diverse education systems.
This is an exciting opportunity for someone passionate about linked open data, education, technology and innovation who is an expert in data science and wants to contribute to ensuring that students have access to free, quality, open educational resources aligned with the national curriculum.
You are responsible for:
- Researching best practices for data models for curriculum digitization
- Providing expertise to develop the data structure needed to represent curriculum standards of different countries in a common format on Wikidata
- Building algorithms and design experiments to merge, manage, interrogate, and extract data from curriculum documents
- Considering the needs for data entry, storage, and representation for curriculum standard documents, and collaborating with curriculum experts to identify best practices for digitizing curriculum with Wikidata
- Ensuring that Ghana’s secondary school curriculum data is added to Wikidata by December 2021 using a model that allows for replicability across countries
- Collaboratively producing guidelines and documentation on how to replicate curriculum digitization with Wikidata beyond Ghana
- Supporting capacity development events that help educators and Wikimedia community members to learn how to contribute education-aligned content on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects
- Producing ongoing updates and summary reports on a quarterly basis
- Supporting the monitoring and evaluation of project activities
Skills and Experience:
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, Mathematics, Economics, Computer Science, Information Management or Statistics or relevant field; graduate degree in Data Science or other quantitative field is preferred
- Proven experience as a Data Scientist or Data Analyst
- Technical expertise regarding data models, database design development, data mining and segmentation techniques
- Understanding of machine-learning and operations research
- Knowledge of statistics and experience using statistical packages for analyzing datasets (Excel, SPSS, SAS, R, SQL and Python); familiarity with Scala, Java or C++ is an asset
- Experience in translating/mapping relational data models into XML and Schemas
- Experience and comfort with manipulating sets of data through tools like Excel, SPARQL, SQL, OpenRefine or similar.
Qualities that are important to us
- Awareness of how Wikidata and other structured or linked data systems works
- Ability to clearly communicate complex technical ideas to a non-technical audience
- Experience creating effective technical communication, such as documentation of tools or software,
- The ability to consult and work collaboratively with individuals and groups across cultures and timezones
- Comfortable presenting to large groups
More about the Wikidata for education Project
In 2020, the absence of curriculum documentation in digitally usable formats prevented education systems from being able to quickly and efficiently respond to the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on face-to-face learning.
The Wikimedia Foundation, within the scope of the concept note developed by UNESCO under the Global Education Coalition, is seeking to launch a proof of concept and pilot project as part of broader efforts to align national curricula to content on Wikimedia projects.
The project proposes to establish a data model within Wikidata and Wikibase to enable the easy aligning of national curricula to Wikimedia projects; and make the information more discoverable for learners and educators. This data model will also:
- Make data about curricula readily available and machine-readable so that developers can create innovative solutions to education challenges.
- Create an education portal with curated content from Wikimedia projects and other open education resources that is aligned with school curricula.
- Give education stakeholders the ability to do a comparative analysis of curricula on a global scale.
- Support the Wikimedia volunteer editing community to improve content related to school curricula.
- Support countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to provide quality teaching and learning materials to all students and comply with UNESCO’s OER Recommendation.
- Improve the capacity of the education system to provide contextualized learning opportunities.
- Close knowledge gaps on Wiki projects through strategic alignment of content on Wikimedia projects with the localization needs of school systems.
How to Apply:
Send an application, accompanied by your CV to the email below using the Job Title as subject.