Projects Step by Step Guide
Introduction
You have decided to get involved in a project with Physiopedia, what's next?
As a project lead you are responsible for developing the parameters of the project with Physiopedia. The project can be for students, clinicians, colleagues or all of the above.
Any educational establishment, accredited clinic or professional health organisation providing physiotherapy or physical therapy education is suited to running a Content Development Project with their students and/or colleagues.
Follow the steps below to guide you through the process from getting started to completing your project! If you have any questions you can visit the Projects FAQ page or contact us by email
Getting Started
Step one, you need to decide what kind of project best suits you and your organisation. As a reminder, we have three main types of Content Development Projects:
- Educational Projects - involving educational establishments for pre and post graduate students as part of their formal university or college education.
- Professional Organisation Projects - run by professional organisations and involving their members for professional development opportunities.
- Clinical Projects - led by clinics as professional development projects for staff and visiting students.
Step two, includes completing this form to let us know your interests. If you are not sure about what type of project or subject you would like to pursue, please reach out to us, we are bursting with ideas. We are here to support you all the way!
From your interests, we will discuss your needs and together formulate a suitable project. We will then ask you for some information relating to your project and with this we will set up your Project Page. These will include:
- Project description
- Project Instructors
- Objectives
- Start and finish dates
- Instructions to students
- Articles (to be worked on by students and / or editing members only)
Next you will need your own Physiopedia account....
Get Your Own Physiopedia Account
Sign up for a Physiopedia account for yourself using the Request Account page.
When you request your account just let us know in the 'Additional Information' box that you wish to set up a project in Physiopedia.
You will receive an email asking you to confirm your email address. Once you have done this wait for another email informing you that your account has been activated. This is a manual process and may take a few days.
Next you should familiarise yourself with editing Physiopedia...
Familiarise Yourself With Editing
Our main recommendation for anyone supporting a Content Development Project in Physiopedia is to become familiar yourself with making edits to pages. The best way to do this is by editing your own Profile Page and familiarise yourself with making edits on the site. At the moment your profile page just includes your short bio (populated from your account request).You can find your profile page by clicking on the Tools option in the top navigation bar.
To edit your page click on the Edit tab. For an example of a good profile page pop over to Rachael Lowe's page.
If you need help with any of this you can refer to the editing your profile tutorial and the user tutorials, where you can find lots of help.
Setting Up Your Project
After editing your Profile page, it is a good idea for you to review your project page in Physiopedia. This is the page we created for you and explains more about your project. This is also the page where can direct your students to as a standard that you would like to see. You can find a list of projects here.
Once you have practiced your editing skills it is time to update your project page. We will share a link to your project page with you. You can now add guidance and instructions to your students, add external links to your university and any additional information you need. You will also need to add a list of pages the students will be developing. If these are new pages see the section below on creating a new page. Don't forget to add links to the Physiopedia pages. For adding external and internal links see the tutorial on making links.
Creating a New Page
If your students are planning to add new content, rather than reviewing an existing page, you will need to learn how to create a new page. It is a simple process and we have a tutorial on creating new pages to help you with this! If you are looking for inspiration you can find some tips in this tutorial.
When you create new pages you can add a template that adds headings and formatting to make it easier for everyone to follow and guide the flow of content. You can find a list of templates here and you can add them by following this guide.This tutorial will show you how to add the template to your new page.
See the articles from the Texas State Project as an example of some great pages, they even created their own images and videos!
Adding Your Project Template to Pages
An important step before your students start is to add project banner to the top of the page. We created this for you when we uploaded your project page. This banner will let everyone know that this is a special page and a work in progress. Once you add this banner nobody else will work on the page until your project has finished. You can find your project banner on the templates page.
To add this banner to your page follow the steps below.
- Find your project banner
- Add your banner - You will need to add some code to your page, but don't worry it is easy.
- Click on the Edit drop down toolbar and choose Edit Source
- At the top of the page you need to code in the following text. You can just copy and paste the text below. Just remember to include your project name and university.
<div class="noeditbox">Welcome to [[The name of your project page]]. This space was created by and for the students at '''Name of your university'''. Please do not edit unless you are involved in this project, but please come back in the future to check out new information! </div>
Here is an example of how your banner will look on your page.
Other Useful Tutorials to Visit
It is also useful for you to know how to add references, images and videos so that you can help students / colleagues with these. You can practice any of this in the Sandbox.
What comes next!
Before your students / colleagues start on their Content Development Project, they will need their own Physiopedia account...
Get Your Students / Colleagues a Physiopedia Account
Get your students / colleagues to sign up for a Physiopedia account by requesting an account as you did. They need to use their full name for their username.
When they request their account, they should inform us in the additional information box that they are working in Physiopedia under your instruction as part of the project.
As you did they will receive an email asking them to confirm their email address. Once they have done this they should wait for another email informing them that your account has been activated. Again, this is a manual process and may take a few days.
Once their account has been activated they are ready to familiarise themselves with making edits on the site...
Initial Familiarisation Session
Feedback from previous projects always recognise the benefits of an initial face-to-face familiarisation session. So, before your students get to work on creating the articles that you tasked them with, it is a good idea to have a familiarisation session. Use this session to go through editing Profile pages and getting familiar with editing pages, just as you have done. Alternatively, send them a copy of the section "Familiarise yourself with editing" above.
If you and your students become familiar with editing Physiopedia in this way at the start of your Project the whole experience will become much easier instead of a technological challenge!
Next, you need to set your students / colleagues about their task...
Instruct Your Students / Colleagues What to Do in Physiopedia
Next you should provide your students / colleagues with tasks to complete in Physiopedia. You should have already decided what the tasks are going to be and they should be written on your project page.
You should set a time frame for the completion of the tasks and project.
You can use your Project Page that has been set up for you in Physiopedia, to display the instructions to your students / colleagues so that they have somewhere to refer to.
Once you know what pages your students will be working on please let us know and we will protect those pages from edits from other users by putting a notice at the top of the page asking people not to edit the page until the project is complete. Alternatively, we can provide you with the code to add this to the top of the page yourself.
Need Help?
Creating and editing pages can be a daunting experience and we have created tutorials and guides to help you along the way but we do understand that there will be times when you or your team just need a little extra guidance and reassurance that you are on the right track. To make this a seamless process we would ask that you designate one senior member of your project team (usually the person leading the project) to act as a liaison for the rest of your team. All queries in the first instance will be directed to your designated lead, hopefully they will be able to find the answer or direct the query in the right direction. However, if they are unable to provide a solution to the problem then this person should contact us via email.
Following the Progress
You can follow your students / colleagues contributions and progress in a number of ways:
- Each Physiopedia page has a History, you can find this by clicking on the Edittab in the top navigation bar. Here you will be able to view how various users have contributed on a specific page. The list shows who made what contributions and when.
- You can flag pages your students / colleagues are working on by using the Watch link at the top of each page. The pages that you are 'watching' can be followed by going to My watchlist. You can find this option in the Tools tab.
- You can also track individual user contributions by visiting their profile page and clicking on User contributions (Under Tools). To find a person's profile page you can go to the User List and search for your student / colleague in the alphabetical list of users, click on their name.
Finishing the Project
Once the project is complete and has been assessed please let us know so that we can network the pages fully into the Physiopedia website. This means that we will remove the notice that asks people to refrain from editing the pages and link it into the site so that it can be easily found.
Provide Feedback to Us
We would be grateful if you would provide us with feedback of your experience of using Physiopedia in your teaching. We will use this feedback to improve Physiopedia as a teaching and learning tool for educators, clinicians and for students. When the project is complete you can send your feedback using this link to our feedback form. You can always provide us with your feedback by email prior to this. We look forward to hearing from you.