The Coalition for Open Education is a partner of the annual “Wiki loves e-textbooks” contest organised by Wikimedia Polska and the Centre for Education Development (a subsidiary of Polish Ministry of Education). Two contests have been organised and completed to date.

The Centre for Education Development coordinates a governmental project “epodręczniki” (e-textbooks) for writing officially approved textbooks for primary and secondary schools in Poland. The textbooks are about to be released under CC-BY license and available for free on the special website in order to replace existing,very expensive paper textbooks printed by commercial publishers. The textbooks are written by teams of professional experts from several Polish universities. However, there are not enough high quality multimedia (photos, vector illustrations, animations, sound recordings, short films) for them, which can be released under free licenses.

The idea of “Wiki loves e-textbooks” contest is to encourage Polish Wikipedians to adopt existing multimedia or create original ones for the needs of the textbooks. Teams of experts are creating tables with needed media, which are published in Wikipedia; then the contest participants can upload them to Wikimedia Commons. The experts then select the most useful files and score the uploaders. While the uploader with the highest score wins the contest, all the uploaded multimedia stay on Commons after the contest. The Wikimedia projects will thus be enriched with files thematically connected with needs of schoolchildren, as well as the “epodreczniki” project and general educational audience in Poland. The contest is financially supported by “Human Capital” program maintained by European Social Fund and Polish government.

[Find the original project description here; project website here].