[mmm] Debbie Weaver and Craig McIntosh from Swinburne University talk about how they've used Wikis to facilitate effective group work for face-to-face and distance online students. They also discuss how they provided effective technical support and how they structured their assessment to cater for the collaborative learning process. >> A Wiki is a collaborative webpage where students all have access to edit, and design, and add content, and add extra pages to. So it's a site that is designed for group work, but to be presented in a web format. The class we're looking at today is an online unit taught through open universities in Australia. >> We'll have up to about 600 students. In OUA on campus we'll probably have 100 students. >> We do a lot of training of students to work in teams on campus, we scuffle teamwork, but we, for fully online students, they're often forgotten about. So we were looking at how we could facilitate online group work. We looked at a few different technology, technologies that could help us with this, and Wiki seemed to be the easiest way to do it. Once students log into the Blackboard site, all of the Wikis are located in their, assessment area. You can see these students have used a variety of different media, text and images in here, including their sources, at the bottom, and then down in the comments section, we get a snapshot of the discussion that's taken place about that particular page. So this is where students are commenting on the current version suggesting to each other what changes can be made, and, and importantly complimenting each other on what they're done. For students to edit the Wiki, they just click on the edit link on the top and it opens up a very, very simple HTML editor. So within their Wiki they can just insert the cursor in the area and just start typing [sss]. And they can select that text and do the basic formatting of making it bold, changing the color, changing the side. They can easily insert images, insert links, anchors, etc. They have to make sure they save it, to make sure those changes are then available for their fellow students to see. As assessors, we get a history and it gives me a list of all the different versions including who's made them and what time, then I can quickly view the difference between two different versions. Here, we've got an example of a, a deletion, an addition, and another deletion further on. So I can very quickly get an idea of who's done the bulk of the work on this site, and what sort of work that's been done, if it's just been a minor word here or there or if it's a significant contribution. For all of the students coming, we have a groups page set up, so here they'll be able to find a list of the people in their group, together with their tutor's name. They've got a discussion board dedicated just to this group of students. They've also got, what we call a collaboration area, where they've got access to chat rooms. So they can have synchronous meetings. Email, where they can quickly send an email to fellow group members to set up meetings or to discuss what they're doing with their project [bbb]. Students didn't have to spend a lot of time learning how to use the technology. The feedback we were getting afterwards was that the Wiki that they produced as a group was so much better than any individual could have produced. To have a project where they're working with other students together and trying to support each other, they, they love the experience. They really enjoy that collegiality that they gain from it. The teaching team collectively we're all very excited to, to be using it, because they got such positive response from the students, we're really happy to keep going with it. As assessors, we could see who is doing what in the Wikis. We could compare relative contributions by the individual group members. We could look at who was contributing significant work, and who was being a free rider or a passenger within the team. [bbb] We didn't know what would work. We hadn't tried off campus group work before, but other people had tried it before. We did consult the literature. >> What we've, we've tried to do is build up a team and maintain that team. I'd have 10, 12 tutors who were involved in it. >> We worked with them quite a bit when we were assessing the Wikis, because especially the first iteration, none of us had assessed a Wiki before, so we had developed our assessment rubric, but we wanted to do this together, so we met as a team and went through all of the wikis together. To work out how we were going to assess the teamwork aspects of it. >> Effort and collaboration are the, the two key factors that we reward in the individual mark component of the wiki. >> We allocated 15 marks of the total marks just towards the teamwork processes. >> To get a 15, we, we want to see that they've shown evidence of collaboration with all of the group members. From 8 to 15, a student needs to show that they've collaborated at some level. If they are getting an 8 for an individual piece of work of some quality, but they've not engaged with the group, so they'll get a reasonable mark for what they've done, but they're not getting them out for the collaboration, and that's, that's, I suppose, the key. [bbb]. >> There was a few support mechanisms in place for students before they started. A manual with some screenshots, some links to some other group Wikis, and we also recorded a lecture demonstration. How to create a Wiki page, and how to edit a Wiki page, and how to add links. Just the really key functions that students wanted to do. >> The context of the Wiki, can be seductive from a technological point of view. Those who have that facility can produce a delightful piece of work that's engaging and dazzling, but it may not be academically, sound. >> We had to then try to help our students understand that it wasn't the glitz and glamour, that we were really looking for. >> We make it clear that the academic content is the most important, that the research is important, that the referencing is important, because these are still basic skills that we're trying to teach them. >> Multimedia as appropriate examples was terrific, but if they couldn't work at how to embed a video, well it didn't really matter. They could provide a, a link to it on another site, and that was perfectly okay too. So we learned how to manage expectations [bbb]. >> Most of them don't believe that they could possibly do a piece of collaborative work. They could do a group work online, and, most of them are pleasantly surprised at the extent to which they achieve a sense of success but also have have a of relationship with the people they work with. >> Using, projects such as wiki projects like this means we can now give our off campus students the same experience, the same feedback and the same opportunity to develop these skills as our on campus students. [bbb]
