Einar Thorsen

Associate Professor of Journalism and Communication at Bournemouth University

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Student Wiki Pages: reflecting on new e-learning strategy for collaborative student notes

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Below are parts of a formal report I have written about my experience of using wiki tools as part of a wider e-learning strategy. You can read about the background to the experiment in part 1 and part 2 of this series.

Summative assessment component (30%) for Communication Skills, Level C unit on BA (Hons) Communication and Media, BA (Hons) English.

Pedagogic aim was to assess students’ ability to working effectively in a computer-mediated environment by applying interpersonal communication skills taught in the unit, in addition to fostering a professional engagement with the unit’s theoretical foundation.

Each of the seven seminar groups had a dedicated wiki section on myBU, which students used for collaboratively producing notes from the weekly lectures and set readings. Comments were used to discuss the lecture and readings with fellow students, as well as strategies for formulating the joint text.

Students were required to contribute to 8 out of 10 lecture weeks. Each student’s contribution was evaluated quantitatively (proportion of text written, number of edits, number of weeks participating) and qualitatively (accuracy, detail and self-reflexivity of final entries).

Evidence of impact
The Student Wiki Pages was an integral part in inspiring students’ commitment to learning on this unit, evidenced by:

1. Ensuring good attendance at lectures and professional attitude to learning

  • The requirement for each student to contribute to a set number of weeks, meant attendance at lectures was essential.
  • Attendance was regularly above 80%, despite being held at Lansdowne campus due to building works at Talbot campus.

2. Inspired student understanding of scholarly literature and engagement in lectures

  • Students developed a competitive spirit about who could be the first to contribute and who would write the most each week. They came prepared and were confident in their contribution to discussion during lectures.
  • Typically around 15% of students even contributed directly to their wiki during the lectures, using laptops or iPads to write and mobile phones to take pictures / record audio.

3. Facilitated electronic peer support and discussion groups

  • Students used the wiki to support each other’s learning by using the collaborative text for revision, asking questions, and discussing lectures and readings.

4. Improved engagement with scholarly literature in both summative assessment components

  • Weekly wiki entries were frequently around 10,000 words, often with 10-15 comments discussing relevant topics – both far exceeding expectation.
  • The quality of the second assignment, an extended essays, was noticeably improved compared to 2009/10. In particular students had a much more solid grasp of conceptual vocabulary and in-depth engagement with a wider range of scholarly literature.

5. Increased grade average for students taking unit

  • The overall grade distribution was significantly improved, including 13 firsts compared to none in 2009/10.

Feedback from a student retaking unit, with experience of wiki pages as both formative and summative assessment:

I also want to say how good an idea it has been to mark the wiki pages. Last year they were up and I paid no real heed to them, as they didn’t affect my grade. However this year they’ve made sure everyone turns up to lectures (which I and others didn’t last year) and will also be an integral part of the bigger assignment. This has also increased my understanding of the unit as I’ve had to do the further reading, which I clearly didn’t last year.

Transferable learning
The Student Wiki Pages assessment encouraged students to develop active learning techniques and scholarship at the start of their degree programmes, providing a solid underpinning for their future studies. Collaboratively producing notes meant students had to be proactive and critically evaluate their own notes from the lecture and the set readings on a weekly basis. This contrasts with a passive form of study, where students superficially read only a selection of the required material, often towards the end of the unit.

Whilst part of this assessment was subject specific, i.e. facilitating students’ experimentation with computer-mediated communication in the context of the theoretical foundation of the Communication Skills unit, this was not integral to the pedagogical benefits of using wiki tools as outlined above. The Student Wiki Pages could form part of any e-learning strategy that complements a series of lectures, seminars or workshops to enhance the overall student experience.

Part 4: I will follow up this post with some more in-depth reflections soon, specifically about how to manage the complexity of this type of assignment (relating to both setting student expectations, reassuring them about ongoing performance, and managing marking).

Update 5th May 2011: Yesterday I received the Vice Chancellor’s Educational Innovation of the Year Award at Bournemouth University for this project. More on the award in Part 4 of this series. Thanks to all the students who took part in the experiment!

Will the paperless office pollute more?

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We finally convinced the School to introduce recycling bins in our part of the University! Well, trialling it at least – one floor of the building initially and then the rest of the School if it works out. You’ve got to start somewhere, right?

Well, my immediate feeling was: great! But this is negligible compared to how much we could be doing!

So I fired off an email to colleagues suggesting we should consider a more encompassing green strategy for reducing our overall impact on the environment – including reducing paper waste from our day-to-day routines (especially meetings!), reducing carbon footprint of travel, reducing energy consumption and switching to green electricity.

This appears to have gone down well with several positive responses – Paul Denison even pointing to the excellent work already having been done by the University in the previous year. In his own words:

SAM [School of Arts and Media] initiated a university wide discussion last year under the banner of ‘sustees‘. A symposium was held and week-long series of talks and activities held. The university is now looking to incorporate sustainability into its corporate responsibility statement and I have been part of this consultation. We have also developed a new programme in sustainable design which is hoping to recruit this year.

What also followed was a string of suggestions as to what we could do – three specifically about removing paper from our workflows:

  1. No longer print study guides, module- and course handbooks, but instead make them available online via Blackboard. We can run off copies for those students who still require them, and perhaps make a folded single-sheet of A3 version with timetable on the inside and other information perceived as essential in paper form on the front and back.
  2. No longer print grade sheets for module and award boards (that will be where you’ve got a bunch of academics all sat with their own pile of 500-odd grade sheets just to nod in acknowledgement for each page). It has been suggested we use a computer and project the grade sheets for all to see (and collectively nod at), thus saving us printing anything.
  3. Meetings. We go through quite a few of those every year and it seems a phenomenal waste to have to print agenda, minutes of previous meeting(s) and all reference documents for each and every person. All essential, but often only referred to sparingly during the meeting. Again an obvious solution seems to be to project the information for all to see and discuss during the meeting, thus saving everyone from printing it individually.

Clearly then the solution to removing paper from academics’ workflow appears, at least in the above examples, to be the use of electronic resources – one way or another. Thus my question is this: will this ‘paperless’ office actually pollute more or less? That is, what is the net benefit (indeed if any) in environmental impact of replacing paper with electronic resources?

Some issues to consider:

  1. The electricity consumed by accessing the replaced papers electronically – this is not simply a one off cost, but required each and every time the document is accessed, by every person that needs to access it.
  2. The electricity consumed by storage – i.e the electronic storage of that document on a centrally located server that is always on.
  3. The obvious environmental impact of producing the computers used to access this electronic information.

These points might appear as if they are going to have a miniscule impact, but just as each single sheet of paper has a minimal impact on its own, it is the cumulative volume of each usage that causes a problem.

Of course, there are other practical advantages and disadvantages by moving away from paper – deserving of a blog post in their own right. However, my concern here is that we must not immediately assume that just because we can remove one problem (the arguably wasteful use of paper), we are necessarily free from the larger impact of this problem (environmental impact, or if you like carbon footprint, of academia).Indeed any strategy that considers the reduction in wasteful use of paper should simultaneously consider how to minimise the impact of the electronic resources that replaces this – for instance by reducing the need for repeatedly accessing information, by streamlining procedures that rely on this information, and (perhaps most obviously) move to using renewable energy sources to support this increased use in electricity.

Please feel free to offer your thoughts and comments below – the above is just my stream of consciousness on the issue. I particularly welcome any feedback on research that compares the environmental impact of paper use versus electronic resources. I’m sure there is a threshold where one becomes more environmentally friendly than the other, but would love to know what it is!