B27 Using Wiki in a Collaborative Group Project: Experiences from a Distance Education Course Ismail Yildiz Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology, Selcuk University Konya, Turkey
[email protected] Engin Kursun Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology, Ataturk University Erzurum, Turkey
[email protected] Fatih Saltan Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology, Mersin University Mersin, Turkey
[email protected] Ali Gök Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology, Mersin University Mersin, Turkey
[email protected] Hasan Karaaslan Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology, Middle East Technical University Ankara, Turkey
[email protected]
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to investigate undergraduate students’ experience on working collaboratively on a group project in wiki environment for a distance education course given blended. To do this, a mixed method research design, a quantitative methodology (online survey) in conjunction with qualitative methodology (msn interviews) was used. In a 6 week summer course, 52 students from different departments participated to this undergraduate course. Preliminary findings showed that wiki is an effective tool for working collaboratively on a group project. Majority of the students (72%) thought that the wiki worked well as a tool to collect and organize information for the assignment, and 65% also thought it worked well as a tool for completing group project. However, 30% of students were neutral about whether wiki encouraged better participation on project.
Introduction All over the world information technologies have been affecting all fields of the life. Instructional environment is one of these fields have been greatly affected by these technological advances. Especially, with the advance of Web2.0 technologies, it becomes easier and faster to communicate and collaborate .There are so kinds of tools and in basic all of them are depend on the same logic like wikis, blogs etc. So this brings not only a number of
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new ideas for instructional environment, but also provides solutions for some problems taking place such environments. There are many challenges and issues associated with computer mediated group work. These are creating the groups in order to choose the appropriate group size and determining the group composition, structuring the learning activities, and facilitating group interactions (Graham, 2003). Computer mediated learning groups may bring some advantages to the group members and the instructor. In this point the power of the media is gaining attention. One of the important challenges in online group work is to assess group members fairly. In this point, if it is used properly, wikis can be a good solution of this problem since in wiki environment it is possible to trace students’ contribution to assignment. Therefore wiki technology “can make the quantity and quality of each group member' s contribution more transparent” (Elgort, Marshall & Pauleen, 2003). Term of wiki comes from the Hawaiian words “wee kee wee kee”. It gives a meaning of quickly. It is a web based system. This concept was proposed by the Ward Cunningham in 1995 in order to share different functions and the documents about software design (Shih, 2007). Wiki is a powerful tool because it facilitates group working, it has an ability to keep the revise history of document, and users have a chance to roll back to the past versions of the document (Robinson, 2006). In this sense, wikis can be used as a flexible platform for asynchronous collaboration to create content (Louridas, 2006). In this study Wikipedia environment was used as a collaborative working tool. The group members worked together in this environment. In the environment students completed a group project together and they discussed the unclear topics in the discussion part. In this context, the present study investigates students’ experiences of using the wiki tool to produce collaborative assignments in an undergraduate distance education course at Middle East Technical University, in Turkey.
Method A mixed method research design, a quantitative methodology (online survey) in conjunction with qualitative methodology (msn interviews) were performed for the purpose of gathering data about students’ experience on working collaboratively on a group project in wiki environment for a distance education course given blended. Participants and context Participants of this study are consisted of fifty-two undergraduate students who are taking CEIT 321 course, Foundations of Distance Education, in summer 2008. They were differentiating from grade 1 to 4. Twentyfour students are studying at a pre-service teacher education program. Most of students were from Department of Computer Engineering (22) and Computer Education and Instructional Technology (20), also there were students from Chemistry Education (2), Business Administration (2), Physics Education (2), Geological Engineering (1), Electrical and Electronic Engineering (1) and Food Engineering (1). The course is designed to enable the students to understand the basic problems of Distance Education/Learning. In this course the student examines the theoretical framework, historical development and practical applications of the distance education movement. They also prepare a group project as a part of this course. This course is a must for computer education students and elective for other students. Instrument For quantitative data, an online survey was used. The survey includes both likert-type and open-ended questions. Most of the survey questions were adopted from a survey developed by Elgort, Smith and Toland (2008) and a few items were adopted from study of Workman (2008). Researchers also add some items to the survey. The survey consisted of three sections. In the first section, demographic information was requested from participants. Second section includes items about general usage of wiki and third section includes items about using wiki in a
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group projects (See Appendix A). For the qualitative data, msn interviews were conducted with participants. Interview schedule were developed by researchers (See Appendix B). Interview questions were parallel with the survey questions but purpose of conducting interview is to get more in-depth data from participants. Procedure First week of the course, students were informed about the group project and process that they will follow during the project. Students are supposed to develop an article collaboratively in wiki environment. Article topics and scope of these topics were determined by researchers. For example, Blended Learning, OpenCourseWare, Podcasting, Web-based Instruction are some of these selected topics. Article topic, evaluation criteria and groups were announced second week of the course. The class was randomly divided into groups of four or three people. There were 14 groups and 4 assistant in the course. Each group was facilitated by an assistant about project topic during the project. Figure 1 summarizes process that was followed after first week of the project.
Figure 1. Process that students followed during the project
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Data Collection and Analysis While collecting data, both online survey and msn interview were used. Out of the 52 students, 45 students participated to online survey and two of them didn’t answer second and third section of the survey. Therefore, analysis was performed on 43 participants. Interviews were conducted with 12 students via msn and 17 students were answered interview questions through e-mail. Extra course credit was given to participation of survey and interview. Online survey was administrated before students submit their project whereas interview were conducted a week before and after submission of the group project. Survey results were performed with SPSS 15.0 program. While analyzing survey results, descriptive statistic was used. For the interview data, content analysis method was used. Findings of interview analysis were used to support survey results.
Results In this section, findings of qualitative and quantitative analysis are presented, but before doing this demographic information about students who participated to online survey is to be given. As stated before 45 students participated to online survey, but two of them didn’t complete the second and first part of the survey. Therefore, these two participants will be excluded from analysis. There were 32 male and 11 female participants in this study. Two thirds of the students reported that this was the first time they have used wiki and all students indicated that they never took a course which uses wiki technology and in addition they have never been as an editor in the wiki environment. The grade that they took from this course is critical for 86% of the students. Main findings of the study Majority of the students (72%) thought that the wiki worked well as a tool to collect and organize information for the assignment, and 65% also thought it worked well as a tool to completing group project. However, 30% of students were neutral about whether wiki encouraged better participation on project. Some of the students think that producing online articles in the Wikipedia environment carries a different role, because these documents will be a resources for the users of Wikipedia, so this valuable property make them excited. One of the students indicated that “…instead of f2f each group members can contribute to online document every time. We can study independently and parallel by this way project can progress rapidly.” Although it makes students working harder, majority of students (72%) find wiki useful to develop wiki project in real life environment where everyone has the right to edit content. This result is also supported by another item in the survey because %72 of the students were disagree with this item which indicate that project should have been restricted only Ceit321 course. One of the most interesting findings of this study is that great majority of the students (86%) thought that the wiki project helped them to understand copyright licensing issues. This finding is interesting since although many advantages of wikis have been stated in the literature, we didn’t come across any study which mention about this advantage. In the study students conducted their project in Wikipedia, so created articles were investigated by the operators of the Wikipedia. In this period they forced to use the copyright issues otherwise operators were interfered and deleted the problematic points related to the copyright issues. Students explain that this property of Wikipedia drive them to obey the related issues. For example one student confessed that without giving reference we could not attached a photo to the article. This situation is remarked by one of the participants as: “In wiki environment copy right issues are very important. The given knowledge should have a reference. It is very important. By this way wiki environment clarifies from the incorrect information, so we have learned that we should not use any knowledge without permission.”
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The largest part of students (67 %) reported that they clearly defined roles of each member, but 21% students were disagreeing with this item. In addition to this, while 63 % of students satisfied with group efforts while preparing project, 25% of the student are neutral about whether they are satisfied with group’s effort in completing the project. In Wikipedia environment it is possible to see the participation of the group members to the created article, so this property affected the students’ contributions in a positive way. This can be clearly seen from following statement reported by one of the respondent: “The discussion page was very useful during the project development because I met my group members only one times so we talk the details at the discussion part. As we can see how much contribution everyone has, it is very useful environment for group projects.” In general, most of the students (69%) felt that wiki environment provided a valuable learning experience for them. They also felt that they (67%) are motivated by working collaboratively in the project. Some of the students claimed that studying in wiki environment improve their comprehension ability, because they could not use the knowledge directly because of the copyright issues. One of the respondents pointed the issue as: “In order to write an article you should search so many different resources, by the way you are learning the related issues…” It is clear from the responses that most of the students (77%) disagree with doing group project with offline facilities. And the students were tri-polar on whether f2f meetings were the most effective way of collaborating on this assignment, but the largest group (30%) agrees with this statement. Interestingly, half of the students (49%) find online approach more effective for sharing of knowledge in the team assignment than the f2f one. The reason for this can be understood by analyzing interview results. One interviewee indicated this by saying: “F2f is more effective than online for normal education but if we have problems about time and place we should prefer wiki environment.” All in all, this study aims to investigate undergraduate students’ experience on working collaboratively on a group project in wiki environment for a distance education course given blended. Results are handled by gathered data from qualitative and quantitative resources. According to the results it can be said that wiki is an effective tool for working collaboratively on a group project.
References Elgort, I., Smith, A. G. & Toland, J. (2008). Is wiki an effective platform for group course work? Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 24(2), 195-210. http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet24/elgort.html P. Louridas, “Using Wikis in Software Development,” IEEE Software, vol. 23, no. 2, 2006, pp. 88–91. Robinson, M. (2006). Wikis in education: social construction as learning. Community College Enterprise 12(2): 107-109. Shih, W.-C., S.-S. Tseng, et al. (2008). Wiki-based rapid prototyping for teaching-material design in e-Learning grids. Computers & Education. 51(3): 1037-1057. Workman, J. J. P. (2008). Wikis in the Classroom: Opportunities and Challenges. Marketing Education Review, 18(1), 19-24.
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