Volunteer Orientation Course

Original Editor - Rachael Lowe

Top Contributors - Admin, Kim Jackson, Rachael Lowe, Tony Lowe, Wendy Walker, Evan Thomas and Richard Benes  

Introduction

Physiopedia is the largest online resource for our profession in the world. It is a community created resource and relies on physiotherapists all over the world to create, review and update content. A major part of this process is undertaken by our volunteer team whose role is to oversee the development of the Physiopedia content. All members of this team are graduates from our Volunteer Orientation Course.

The Volunteer Orientation Course runs twice a year in the spring and autumn. You can register your interest here.

Course Aim

The aim of the Volunteer Orientation Course is to prepare individuals to be a part of the Physiopedia volunteer team.

Course co-ordinators

During this course you will be personally mentored by Physiopedia co-founder and trustee, Rachael Lowe.

Course Summary

This is a completely online course.

Participants will be given 3 tasks each week that you can complete in your own time, these tasks are to:

1. Complete between 2 and 5 learning activities each week
2. Look at additional readings, videos and resources
3. Contribute to an online discussion run through our chatting platform, Slack

You will also be actively encouraged to share your course activities and reflections through your own social media platforms.

Course outline

1. Week one:
2. Week two:
3. Week three:
4. Week four:

Learning Objectives

At the end of this course you will:

1. Be familiar with the many varied aspects of the Physiopedia project.
2. Be confident to edit Physiopedia.
3. Be familiar with the Physiopedia quality standards.
4. Have an idea of what role they would like to play in the Physiopedia project.
5. Develop key professional skills such as digital skills, social media skills and professionalism.

Accreditation, Assessment and Certification

On the successful completion of this course (assessed by the course co-ordinators) each participant will be provided with a certificate of completion from Physiopedia plus a Yellow Belt badge. These will be awarded provided you have:

1. Completed your Physiopedia profile page.
2. Quality assessed several pages within Physiopedia.
3. Created your own new Physiopedia page.
4. Submitted a reflective piece of work on your experience of the course.
5. Contributed to the discussion in Slack each week.
6. Completed your volunteer orientation activity report.

Time commitment

This course is 4 weeks long. Participants will be required to devote a minimum of 4 hours per week to the course.

Intended audience

This course is suitable for any physiotherapist or physical therapist who would like to contribute to the Physiopedia project as a part of the official volunteer team.

Participants on this course must be:

1. A physiotherapist or physical therapist.
2. Intending to take on a volunteer role within the Physiopedia project on completion of the course.
3. Committed to making monthly contributions to the Physiopedia project.
4. Willing to make edits to the Physiopedia website.

Course Contacts

Throughout this course you should email us if you have any problems at all. We would prefer that you let us know about problems or difficulties that you have encountered so that we can amend the guidance documents or create help videos and provide feedback and training where appropriate.

Contact course co-ordinator

Useful Links

You might find these resources useful throughout the course:

• Volunteer
• User Help Tutorials
• MediaWiki (this is the software that Physiopedia uses - the same as Wikipedia)
• Wikitext examples (This is the code that is written on the Physiopedia pages)