Wikis for group work: Encouraging transparency, benchmarking, and feedback
Abstract
Technology is recognised as playing a part in the changing landscape in higher education; altering delivery modes and providing flexible opportunities for learning. Research into the use of wikis has shown that they provide many opportunities for student learning and the development of twenty-first century skills, however, there has been limited success in their use for collaboration. In this exploratory research, we report on a group wiki project in an engineering management unit at an Australian university. A wiki was introduced to replace the existing group report assessment to add transparency to the task. Each group had their own wiki and students were required to provide feedback to other group wikis which enabled transparency of students' report development and group progress. The research aim was to investigate student perceptions of using a wiki. Students found the wikis helpful for benchmarking their activity against their peers. Students stated that peer feedback had improved their work; however, much of the feedback given by peers was too brief to be constructive, and provided too late to be useful in guiding their work. This paper will be of interest to academics interested in using wikis in their teaching to develop feedback, transparency, and benchmarking. © 2017.
Wikis for a collaborative problem-solving (CPS) module for secondary school science
Abstract
Collaborative problem solving (CPS) can support online learning by enabling interactions for social and cognitive processes. Teachers may not have sufficient knowledge to support such interactions, so support needs to be designed into learning modules for this purpose. This study investigates to what extent an online module for teaching nutrition in secondary school science, using a wiki for CPS, enables interactions, and social and cognitive processes. The module was implemented with 31 volunteer participants. Data collected from the online communications was analyzed for the types of interactions and processes based on the Community of Inquiry Framework. This was triangulated using transcripts of interviews with students. In addition, pretests and posttests were conducted to determine whether the learning outcomes were achieved. Analysis of the online communications showed that the interactions were mainly between learner and content (64.4%), with a large portion of cognitive processes (69.3%) but little social (4.0%), attitudes (9.9%), teaching processes (12.9%) and noise (5.9%). The findings suggest that the module could be used to improve outcomes of learning and encourage interactions for cognitive processes and online presences. The findings may provide insights in encouraging CPS for learning science online.
