Collaborative tools that enable students to co-create documents can be a powerful component of online or blended learning environments. Depending on the task set, students can benefit from the principles of active learning and constructivism as they organise, reformulate and generate their own understandings.
The term ‘wiki’ is used to describe website pages that can be collaboratively edited by a community of users. The most prominent example of this in action is Wikipedia, essentially a collaboratively edited encyclopedia that is now one of the most ubiquitous sources of information on the internet. Because pages can be edited by anyone, any changes made are tracked to encourage users to take responsibility for their contributions. This absence of hierarchy can lead to conflicted points of view, and so wiki’s often make use of external references to support information or justify changes.
Glossaries
An easy wiki-based activity that drives engagement with subject content is to ask students to create a glossary of key terms as they are used in your subject or field. You can ask students to add terms to the glossary as they encounter them in their learning materials, and also to add a definition and an example sentence using the term. The process of identifying and defining a term will help students remember it and be able to use it correctly in their written work. The glossary can also be used as a reference as they work through the course and become more deeply engaged in their academic field.
Annotated bibliographies
In preparation for an assignment, or even as an assignment itself, a collaboratively sourced annotated bibliography makes excellent use of a wiki. Students can work together to identify texts and evaluate their usefulness for upcoming assignments. This process not only encourages students to engage with a wide range of texts, but also provides them with insights into sources that they may not have had when working individually.
Case studies
Wikis provide a great platform for the development of collaborative case studies. Following the presentation and analysis of an example, students can be directed to spaces containing their topics, source materials and an outline of the prescribed case study structure – you could, for example, set up pages with headings already included. It’s then up to the student groups to build and edit their case study together.
Timelines of my accordion section
It’s always a good idea for students to get a perspective on the development of ideas, technologies and events within the subject or discipline they are studying. And it’s even better if they can research and construct this overview themselves. The process of deciding what key developments look like and condensing these into short, chronologically organised summaries enables students to more clearly see how the current situation has built on the past, and how innovations and mistakes of the past have driven their chosen field forward. This makes them more able to think critically about ways that their field may be developing.
Research projects
Wikis provide the perfect space for documenting ongoing, multi-stage research projects. Student groups can contribute to literature reviews, iterations of study design and to the development of analyses. As they are usually open to the whole class, such spaces also allow for different groups to learn from the design of other’s research projects and for tutors to monitor and guide students as projects develop.
Like all learning and teaching activities, successful use of wikis depends upon effective support and explicit scaffolding of each stage of the activity and/or assessment process. In order to maximise the chances of successful implementation of wiki-based projects, you should:
- Make instructions explicit and be very clear about your expectations of student engagement and contribution.
- Get students to contribute to and agree upon rules for how they will use the collaborative tool. How will they resolve conflicts?
- Build in time for practice by starting with a short wiki-based task before attempting a large, collaborative project.
- Use staged assessment tasks to drive ongoing student engagement (e.g., each student needs to contribute 2 terms to a collaborative glossary).
- While a Google Doc is not a wiki, it can be set up to allow multiple contributors to edit a document – all edits are tracked automatically, enabling identical functionality to a wiki
- Canvas does not have a dedicated wiki page tool, but you can easily achieve similar functionality with a combination of editable pages and discussion threads, and the Groups function
