Session T3F
Work in Progress - Implantation of a Collaborative Student-Centered Learning Environment in a Wireless Technology Course Jesús Requena-Carrión, Ana Belén Rodríguez-González, Antonio G. Marques, David Gutiérrez-Pérez Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain,
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[email protected] Abstract – Engineering students face their professional future with uncertainty partly because of a poor understanding of the industry and careers opportunities. This problem can be tackled by designing an engineering curriculum that includes courses embodying both technical and professional contents. In this paper we report the preliminary results of the implantation of a lifelong, collaborative student-centered learning environment that emphasizes both technical and professional aspects of engineering. A semi-public wiki database was used in a course on wireless technologies for senior electrical engineering students. Wiki-entries were created by students under teacher supervision, and were intended to provide an overview of a wireless technology, companies in the sector and careers opportunities. Student’s gain of knowledge and level of satisfaction, and the degree of utilization of the wiki were analyzed based on student’s marks, student surveys, log files tracking the wiki activity, and the quality of the wiki entries. Results are positive and indicate that students have understood the importance of approaching their professional future in a collaborative way. Index Terms - Collaborative web-based learning, Higher education, Pedagogical issues, Innovation. INTRODUCTION It is common that senior engineering students face their professional future with uncertainty. This uncertainty is due partly to an incomplete understanding of industry sectors and their careers opportunities. A way to deal with this difficulty consists of adapting the engineering curriculum by including courses for senior students that combine both technical and professional aspects of engineering. A successful implantation of such courses would require new teaching methodologies that promote lifelong, studentcentered learning. In this paper we describe the preliminary results of the implementation of a lifelong, collaborative student-centered learning environment in a course of wireless technologies. In this course, the technical and professional aspects of wireless technologies are considered. The new learning environment was based on the development of a wiki database. A wikis is an online editing tool, easy to use and suitable for
collaborative applications, that are being used more and more for educational purposes [1] [2] [3] [4]. By using a collaborative approach to learning we sought to create a ‘communication and comment’ culture, in which discussion, negotiation and peer-assessment dynamics are crucial to enhance personal and interpersonal skills, and to improve the quality of their work [4]. STUDY DESIGN We implemented a semi-public wiki-based learning environment [5] using the free software package provided by MediaWiki [6]. The purpose of using a semi-public wiki approach is two-fold. On the one hand, it allows developing an open repository of shared knowledge and experiences over time that is accessible to both the university community and global community. On the other, it facilitates students to get involved in the work of their peers. In order to assess the educational value of using wikis, we sought to analyze: (i) effective learning (from a double technology-industry perspective), (ii) collaboration among students and (iii) role of the wiki in learning. The working group consisted of 18 senior electrical engineering students enrolled on an on-campus course on wireless technologies. Students were familiar with the concept of wiki, but only one third of them had ever edited one, and never in an educational context. Following a constructivist approach [7], wiki-entries were created by students under teacher supervision. Each entry was intended to provide an overview of a specific wireless technology, the companies in the industrial sector and careers opportunities. Entries were assigned to groups of 2-3 people, although students were also encouraged to participate in entries different from that assigned officially. The data were gathered during the first year of implementation and consisted mainly of student’s marks, student surveys, log files tracking the wiki activity, and content and structure of the wiki entries. The survey consisted of 23 questions that were designed to facilitate the analysis of the main objectives of our study [cf. (i)-(iii)]. Five of the questions were dichotomic while all others were five-valued. Students could also write any additional comment or suggestion they thought was relevant for the course.
978-1-4244-4714-5/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE October 18 - 21, 2009, San Antonio, TX 39th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference T3F-1
Session T3F PRELIMINARY RESULTS: FINDINGS
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH
The overall impression about the new approach was fairly positive. Teachers and students were satisfied with the experience. More than 90% of the students answered that complementing the study of a technology with the business opportunities is pertinent and three fourths of them recommended using this approach in future years. In terms of effective learning, there was a clear improvement in the marks compared to previous years. More importantly, the quality of the entries of the wiki was fair/high and the balance between the technical and professional perspective was adequate in all but one case. Students’ perception matched up with this conclusion. Specifically, when asked to rank on a 0-4 scale their level of knowledge of the wireless technology industry, the value rose from 1.25 before taking the course up to 2.50 after finishing it. The analysis of the collaboration among students yields some of the most interesting findings of this work. The logfile tracking the changes in the wiki reveals that there were no significant differences in terms of level of participation among members of the same group. The log-file also shows that the activity in entries different from the one officially assigned was minimal (in nearly four fifths was nonexisting). In other words, there was intra-group collaboration but not inter-group collaboration. This finding agrees with [1]. Two thirds of the students answered that the visibility of the wiki was a stimulus to increase the quality of their work and half of them said that they had asked people not involved in the course to check their own entries. It is worth remarking that one of the students also mentioned that the visibility of the wiki incentives competitiveness among groups. We found these preliminary results very interesting and believe that the consideration of tactics to enforce further cooperation is a meaningful way to expand our study. The impact of the utilization of the wiki was another subject of interest. After finishing the course, nearly 90% of the students expressed that knowing the process of elaborating a wiki was (very) important, while two thirds of them answered that using wikis as way to present an essay entails advantages compared to classic paper alternative. Although only one third of them had worked with a wiki before, all of the students found the tools for editing the wiki fairly simple. Last but not least, since reliability is typically a controversial aspect of wikis we surveyed students about this issue. By far, the source most highly used was internet (85%), followed by books (45%) and technical journals (40%). More than 80% of the students said that they always checked the reliability of the posted information while only one admitted that he/she rarely did so.
Although the small-scale of this project prevents from straightforward generalization of the conclusions, it is worth remarking that student’s first reaction to the professional orientation of the course and to the learning environment has been positive and they have understood the importance of approaching their professional future in a collaborative way. The possibility to access their peer’s projects has encouraged them to reflect on their own and motivated to increase the quality. This is a work in progress that we plan to expand. Among the lines to explore in the near future we can mention: (a) repeating the experience during incoming years so that new data can be used to enhance the reliability of our analysis; (b) implementing this methodology in other courses; (c) studying the activity and the opinion of external users that access to the wiki; and (d) exploring methods to enforce further cooperation among students. REFERENCES [1]
Notari, M, "How to Use a Wiki in Education: Wiki based Effective Constructive Learning", WikiSym’06, August 21-23, 131-132 (2006).
[2]
Guth, S, "Wikis in Education: Is Public Better", WikiSym’07, October 21-23, 131-132 (2007).
[3]
Tan, C., and Chan,Y.Y., "Knowledge Community: A KnowledgeBuilding System for Global Collaborative Project Learning", Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 96, No. 6, June 2008. pp 1049-1061.
[4]
Cole, M., "Using Wiki technology to support student engagement: Lessons from the trenches", Computers & Education No. 52, 2009, pp. 141-146.
[5]
http://www.tsc.urjc.es/tc-wiki.
[6]
http://www.mediawiki.org
[7]
Gokhale, A.A., "Collaborative Learning Enhances Critical Thinking", Journal of Technology Education, Vol. 7 No. 1, 1995, pp 22-30.
AUTHOR INFORMATION Jesús Requena-Carrión, Assistant Professor at Rey Juan Carlos University and member of IEEE. Ana Belén Rodríguez-González, Assistant Professor at Rey Juan Carlos University. Antonio G. Marques, Assistant Professor at Rey Juan Carlos University and member of IEEE. Since 2005 he is also a Visiting Researcher at University of Minnesota. David Gutiérrez-Pérez, Teaching Assistant at Rey Juan Carlos University.
978-1-4244-4714-5/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE October 18 - 21, 2009, San Antonio, TX 39th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference T3F-2
