Let the Students Prepare the Learning Material Using Moodle Wiki

Less used Moodle activities

In this new series of blogs, TaLT would like to explore the less used Moodle activities and share with you some great experience from our academics. In many cases, you will find the approaches quite handy and useful creating a student-centred and collaborative learning environment for our learners. And in some cases, such as using Moodle wiki, it might also create a more interesting assessment and feedback approach while reducing teacher workload.

Moodle Wiki 

When people hear word "Wiki", the first thing that comes to their mind would be Wikipedia. Whether or not its contents are suitable for the academic purpose is a question. But it is definitely a very good example using Wiki to host interesting contents. A Wiki allows any user of the website to create, edit, and even comment on contents. It requires no coding knowledge but still offers functions such as multimedia or hyperlinks. In teaching practices, it provides great potential for a collaborative learning approach.

Moodle also has a Wiki activity for us to use. It can be quite useful when designing learning activities such as group lecture notes, brainstorming, group projects, and drafting when contributing to other internet Wikis.

Let the students prepare the learning material

Last semester, one of us own, Associate Professor Dewi Tojib, started to try a new learning task with Moodle Wiki for her students in the unit MKC2110 Buyer behaviour in marketing.

In this assessment task, students worked together in pairs to create a Wiki entry based on a randomly assigned consumer behaviour concept introduced in the unit. It required students to research, describe the concept, and discuss one real-life marking stimulus using the concept with visual materials. After students had submitted their wiki entries, teachers reviewed, graded, and provided feedback to the initial submission. Students would revise the wiki entries until they got the teacher's approval. A detailed Wiki marking rubric has been designed by Dewi and distributed to the students to standardise the grading.

After several weeks hard working from the students and teachers, a consumer behaviour Wiki containing dozens of concept items has been created in this collaborative learning process. Students also have the ability to comment on the Wiki entries. The Wiki was widely used when students prepared for the final exam. (447 clicks by 129 out of 160 students)

It has been a quite successful trial using Wiki as a collaborative learning tool. Detailed instruction and marking rubric offered students good guidance when writing Wiki entries. Students also received individual feedback to their work from the teachers. At the end of the assessment task, student work compiled into a useful Wiki learning resource which students used quite actively. The social constructivist learning theory was used to shift the teacher-centred approach to a student-centred one. We believe that it helped the students feel more satisfied in the learning process.

Future work

How can the assessment task be improved next semester? How about enhancing the student interactions in the Wiki. Maybe the new task can provide them opportunities to comment on all Wiki entries and edit their own entries in a more flexible approach. Hopefully, it might improve the student engagement and improve the student community cohesion by sharing knowledge. If you have any new idea about using Wiki in teaching, please feel free to post a comment below the blog.


Reference
Biasutti M., El-Denghaidy H., Using Wiki in teacher education: Impact on knowledge management processes and student satisfaction, Computers & Education, Volume 59, Issue 3, November 2012, 861-872

Bring Ideas to Life with Wolfram Demonstrations Project

New Semester

How is the new semester going? We hope that you are enjoying teaching the new student cohorts this semester. Have you ever seen them using a search engine called WolframAlpha other than Google? It is quite interesting as when searching for academic knowledge, it gives a set of related contents with equations and diagrams if applicable. It is quite handy and is popular among college students.

Wolfram Demonstrations Projects

The same company developed WolframApha and the famous Mathematica also created the Wolfram Demonstration Project to bring ideas to life. The project is an open-code resource that uses dynamic computation to illuminate concepts in science, technology, mathematics, art, finance, and a remarkable range of other fields.

The following video is a demo of the daylight calculator in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. With this demonstration, teachers can use it to explain the concepts in a much more visualised approach. It also allows students to play with it to have a better understanding of the concept and master the calculation.

What is good?

What is so good about it? Let's count:

1. It brings ideas to life with its interactive and visualised features. 
2. Now it has 11317 interactive demonstrations covering topics over math, physical sciences, life science, business & social system, system & model, engineering & technology,  arts & humanities, and kids & gaming.
3. It is an open source system and hundreds if not thousands of authors have contributed to the demonstrations project.
4. It is free for any teacher or student to use.
5. You can embed that into your Moodle unit

Hey, it sounds really good. How about taking a look and playing with some examples by yourselves? Download and install the free Wolfram CDF Player. Try Consumer Choice: Income, Taste, and Prices or Radial Engine with the Internet Explorer (When we tested it, it had issues when running in more popular Chrome and Firefox)

What is not so good?

It works quite nice independently with the desktop application. It also means that it could be difficult to integrate the demonstrations into LMS or Powerpoint. Even though it works fine with Internet Explorer when we tested it, it had issues when running in more popular Chrome and Firefox.

What's in it for us?

Using the interactive visualisation of the concepts in nearly any topic in the business school. As the teacher or the student move a Demonstration's control, they can see a change in its output that helps the students to understand the concepts.

And the good thing is that we don't need to do anything but just find one Demonstration to use. You can either browse the categories to explore topics or simply search the concepts. There are plenty of Demonstrations waiting for you to explore.

 

If you are interested, give it a try. We think that it could be quite useful if it happens that someone has contributed the Demonstrations that we are planning to use in our teaching. It can be a good learning experience for the students. You can find the frequently asked questions on this page.