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Good Practice in Using wikis to enhance learning, student support and retention for business students

 

 

Description

Since their  introduction in early 2000, wikis have been used as a tool to assist businesses (Leuf&Cunningham, 2001; Cortese, 2003; Goodnoe, 2005) as well as e-learning environments in schools and higher education (Leuf&Cunningham, 2001; Bruns & Humphreys, 2005;  Richardson 2006), by providing  new and simple ways for a  web-based collaboration and authoring.

The main purpose of this project is to assess to what extent wikis can support students learning and improve the quality of their work. To that end we will concentrate on the  following two use-cases:

On-line reviews of work of other students
Collaborative creation of learning objects,
in the context of a  summative assessment involving 40 MSc Business school students.

The participants in both usecase are students and tutors registered on the module wiki (including module internal and external moderators).

In the “on-line review” case, students upload their essay drafts on the wiki, modify or extend them and provide feedback to their peers. Tutors provide feedback to students on the work in progress. In that way, the work of students and the feedback they receive on the wiki are completely transparent.

A learning object can be either of the following: on-line glossary, literature review or various “tips” and “guidelines”. In this usecase tutor creates initial set of wiki pages (templates) for each of the learning objects and students contribute regularly by adding content to this  growing knowledge base (also known as “structured bulletin board”  (Leuf & Cunningham, 2001)).

The two usecases described above will enable formation of students “on-line portfolios” (an extension of “ePortfolios” as defined by Dr Helen Barrett of the University of Alaska in early 1990s.).

The above usecases  build on existing learning theories such as constructivism, social learning, Vygotskys’ social cognition learning model and Laurillard's “conversational approach” to learning.

 

 

Organisations / Institutions

Hertfordshire University

 

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