What is a wiki?
A wiki is an ‘online editable website’ (Wallis & Jeckells, 2008). The key feature is that the content of the wiki can be edited collaboratively, with those edits being made either synchronously or asynchronously.
Why are wikis useful for assessment?
A wiki provides a flexible platform that can offer opportunities for constructivist as well as collaborative learning (Cole, 2009). The former encourages the student to be a producer of knowledge. The latter involves the promotion of student collaboration (Revere & Kovach, 2011), although the full benefit of this may not be gained unless there is discussion in advance of the collaborative process.
Examples of use
1. A second year biomechanics class are asked to produce a Wiki discussing the biomechanics of a sporting activity of their choice. In groups of four, the students must create a multi-page wiki that provides context for the activity, details the phases of the activity and the movements involved, and introduces the underlying mechanical principles. The students can shoot and embed their own high-speed videos of the activity, along with other images. The content should be written for an audience with some sports science knowledge, but biomechanical terms can be linked to definitions on a separate glossary page.
2. Please feel free to share any scenarios in which you’ve used wikis for assessment (by leaving a comment below).
Popular tools
The right software for your use will depend on a lot of factors – class size, finance, support from your institution’s IT department etc. Some of the more common options that you may wish to explore are:
- wiki functionality built into VLEs such as Blackboard and Moodle
- MediaWiki(free and open source, but some IT background is helpful)
- TikiWiki (free and open source)
- PBworks (simple to use, commercial software, but free for up to 100 users and 2GB of storage)
- wikispaces (commercial software, but free for a single site with up to 2GB of storage)
- Confluence (commercial software, but a 30 day free trial is available)
(…or, if you really have too much free time, Wikipedia has a very detailed Comparison of wiki software.)
References
Please see the shared list under Resources.