Tag Archives: teaching

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!

Student wiki notes – additional guidelines

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The Student Wiki Pages experiment I described previously is going very well so far, with students collaboratively producing notes of (mostly) very high quality and using the comment facility to discuss issues that come up in the lecture and their readings.

However, I have had a few emails over the past days from students concerned about various aspects of the assessment. These do not apply to all the seminar groups, but in order to ensure consistency, I provided some additional guidelines for all students as outlined below.

  • The wiki pages will never be complete, so the argument that people before you have written “everything” does not stand. You can contribute 1) notes from the lecture, 2) notes from the readings, 3) notes or observations on the videos from the lecture, 4) additional examples illustrating points from lecture or readings, 5) post comments discussing or reflecting upon the wiki page contents.
  • However, the wiki pages are NOT designed to be a competition! They are intended to be a collaborative process. To this end, you may want to contribute your notes in batches, so as to allow other people to add their own notes (but this is entirely up to you and there are no formal restrictions concerning this). It is your collective responsibility to ensure that everyone feels able to do so and that you all engage in dialogue with fellow students. If concerns remain about how to best do this, please discuss in your seminar group and agree on how to best tackle it.
  • You are marked on the quality of your content as well as the extent to which you are able to collectively work to produce the notes. That means a page written by a large number of contributors will likely score higher than one written by only one or two contributors, provided the content is of a similar standard. Hint: this is a unit on communication skills, use them!
  • If you are editing the wiki simultaneously, the tool may generate a new page with your modification or text. There is no way around this at the moment, other than to manually move your content across to the main page for that week (I’m trying to find a fix). Please make sure you do so if you are having conflict issues like this, though I will look at all pages submitted for each week when marking. To this end, could you all please ensure the pages have a common naming structure (e.g. Week 11, Week 12 A, Week 12 B, Week 13… or whatever you have decided upon)?
  • I can assist with technical issues of not having the correct permissions, but if you are having technical difficulties beyond this, please contact IT helpdesk who should be able to help.

    • So far it appears this resolved most people’s concerns (judging by comments posted on wiki pages), though I’ll know for certain come Monday’s lecture…

    The Future of Social Media in Journalism

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    Vadim Lavrusik:

    all media as we know it today will become social, and feature a social component to one extent or another. [...]

    But more importantly, these social tools are inspiring readers to become citizen journalists by enabling them to easily publish and share information on a greater scale. The future journalist will be more embedded with the community than ever, and news outlets will build their newsrooms to focus on utilizing the community and enabling its members to be enrolled as correspondents. Bloggers will no longer be just bloggers, but be relied upon as more credible sources.

    Excellent overview of:
    - Collaborative Reporting
    - Journalists as Community Managers
    - The Social Beat
    - Social Stories
    - Online Curation for a “Time-Poor Audience”
    - The Social Network as the New Editor
    - Beyond Twitter & Facebook
    - Monetizing Social
    - A Social Newsroom and the Personal Brand
    - A Mobile Social Experience

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    As university spurns NCTJ accreditation, do journalists need it nowadays?

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    Brian McNair argues that journalists of the future need:

    talent, imagination, a spirit of independence, an understanding of IT and social networking and their impact on media, culture and society in general; everything in short, that the NCTJ curriculum squeezed out with its relentless stress on externally-decreed learning by rote.

    [...]

    The old world of print journalism in which the NCTJ was formed is passing into history, replaced by content-generating users, citizen journalists and all those journalistic wannabees who make up the globalised, digitised public sphere in the 21st century.

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    University of Colorado may shut down journalism school to create a more tech-oriented degree program

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    Stefanie Chernow writing at the Editors Weblog:

    Digital trends in the media are affecting every aspect of the journalism field, including education. The University of Colorado at Boulder is pondering closing its journalism department in favor of a new degree program that would combine journalism and computer science skills. According to Editor & Publisher, the new academic unit could compound on existing strengths in journalism, yet adding computer science course will "prepare students for an ever-changing communications and media marketplace."

    Another example of other disciplines taking over journalism education.

    Still baffles me how the industry struggles to differentiate between online / multimedia journalism and web development / production… the two are not and never will be the same thing.

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