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