Volunteer Orientation Course

Introduction

Physiopedia is the largest online resource for our profession in the world. It is a community created resource and relies on physiotherapists and physical therapists all over the world to create, review and update content. To manage all these updates we have an official 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 Pages

• Pre-Course Activities
• Course Activities

Aim

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

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.

Intended audience

This course is suitable for any Physiotherapist/Physical Therapist who would like to contribute to the Physiopedia project as a volunteer.

Find out more about volunteering with Physiopedia.

Course structure

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.

Time commitment

This course is 4 weeks long. Participants will be required to devote a minimum of 3 hours per week to the course.

Pre-requisites

Participants on this course must be:

1. A Physiotherapist/Physical Therapist or Physiotherapy/Physical Therapy student.
2. Intending to take on a volunteer role within the Physiopedia project on completion of the course.
3. Willing to make edits to the Physiopedia website.

Language

The course will be run in English although participants will only require basic English skills. Participants will be encouraged to be respectful and empathetic to those for whom English is not their first language.

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 3 pages within Physiopedia.
3. Created your own new Physiopedia page.
4. Submit a piece of work in relation to your desired volunteer role.
5. Contributed to the online Facebook discussion each week.
6. Completed your volunteer orientation activity report.

On completion of the course and once your ongoing role has been agreed you will also be offered:

• FREE membership of Physiopedia Plus

People involved in this course

Course co-ordinators

The course co-ordinator for this course are:

• Rachael Lowe
• Evan Thomas
• George Prudden

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

Resources

You might find these resources useful throughout the course:

• Volunteer
• Volunteers
• Volunteer Roles
• 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)