Web 2.0 technology case study1
Case study title Author’s name School / Department Institution Background Bringing lecture notes to life using a wiki tool Katy Jordan, Frances Tracy and Keith Johnstone Department of Plant Sciences University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is one of the oldest Universities in the UK, and has a reputation for excellence in both research and education. It is a collegiate university; undergraduate students typically live and have small-group tutorials within college, but the broader content of a course and syllabus is managed and delivered by lectures in research-led academic departments. The Department of Plant Sciences teaches lecture courses to undergraduate students studying within the Natural Sciences Tripos (NST). The Plant Sciences Pedagogy Project has been running within the department since Autumn 2005, and focuses upon the second year course the department runs within the NST, known as ‘Part IB Plant and Microbial Sciences’ (IB PMS). Part of the Plant Sciences Pedagogy Project remit was to enhance and create online learning resources for IB PMS students. Although there is a very wide range of online learning technology now available, we wanted to make sure that students would find our new resources genuinely useful, and to avoid the pitfall of using technology for its own sake. Right from the start of the project, a range of research activities – including dual-scale questionnaires, focus groups and semi-structured interviews – were carried out to elicit staff and student opinions and expectations of teaching on the IB PMS course. We then sought to use this research evidence to inform development of novel online learning resources to complement and support the taught course. To allow students’ to have more powerful access to their lecture notes and course materials; to help students to view the course as an interlinked network of topics rather than a collection of disconnected lecture blocks. To allow course materials to use features which are common to internet browsing – such as making lecture notes searchable, and using Wikipedia-style links to a definition of a word where it appears in text. To create an environment from the lecture material within which extra learning resources (such as flash animations, narrated Powerpoint slides, or online multiple choice questions, for example) pertinent to a particular troublesome topic or concept could be linked-in and integrated at the exact point students encounter this topic, rather than being in a separate file folder or web site.
The challenge
Intended outcome(s)
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This template is based on Centre for Bioscience templates and the JISC Effective Practice with e-learning project (http://www.elearning.ac.uk/news_folder/innoprac).
Established practice
Before the creation of the wiki-based notes within a Sakai virtual learning environment, the IB Plant Sciences course had used a ‘CourseWork’ VLE, since 2005 – prior to this, there was no university-wide VLE. CourseWork provided a ‘file storage’ type of online environment, essentially a long list (with expandable or hideable sub-sections ) of files, such as Powerpoint lecture slides, lecture notes as pdfs, and forms and other information as Word documents, for example. Drawing on some of the results of initial research activities, we compiled a list of features we wanted the new online resources to have, including: searchable lecture notes; course materials to be integrated with each other, reflecting the course structure; and for other online resources to be able to be linked in to lecture notes to support challenging concepts or provide links to authentic ‘realworld’ examples as appropriate. We quickly realised, based on our previous personal experiences of using Wikipedia, that using a wiki tool could effectively address many of these criteria. Co-incidentally, at the same time, the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET), which ran the universities’ CourseWork VLE at the time, unveiled a new Sakaibased VLE which would be introduced across the university the following Autumn. Crucially, this new environment included a built in ‘wiki’ tool, which we could then use to house the lecture materials (handouts and Powerpoint slides) instead of the usual file-store style ‘resources’ tool.
The plan
The ‘Web 2.0’ advantage
It would be possible to create a similar online lecture note resource by creating a network of linked html pages, but it would have taken a great deal more time and effort. All hyperlinks to other pages and hosting of pages are handled within the wiki tool itself, and not being familiar with html doesn’t stop you from using a wiki; wiki markup is simpler than html, and many wikis now have direct ‘What you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) user interfaces. Staff and students had previously used a different (non-wiki based) virtual learning environment within the department. Using the previous system, a precedent had been set that staff would send electronic versions (pdfs, Powerpoint slides etc.) of their lecture materials to an administrator, who would then upload the materials. The change has meant that the administrator has required some training in managing materials in the wiki, but for teaching staff on the whole it has not increased workload at all. Most importantly, from the outset - before creating any pages devise a framework structure for the hierarchy of pages that will result. Keep it as simple and logical as possible. You can go back and change it later, but risk ending up with ‘orphaned’ pages to which nothing links. A poorly thought out structure could leave people unable to find something important buried within a wiki. Although wikis are typically associated with collaboration and being open to edit by any user, this might not be a favourable feature for wiki-based lecture notes. To maintain the factual integrity of the core course content, we have restricted editing rights to members of staff. It is essentially ‘read only’ for students, and wiki tools usually provide a way of managing editing rights for different groups of
Changes
Key points for effective practice
users. Evaluation In terms of staff workload, having lecture notes in a wiki made no difference so far, as lecturers generally did not upload materials to the previous VLE themselves – they would produce Powerpoint slides and handouts, which would be uploaded by a course administrator. There is the potential for staff workload to decrease in future as a result of the wiki use, however, as now that the course is in a wiki format, it can be ‘cloned’ each year, so the lecture handouts and slides from the previous year already exist - staff then only need to supply the relevant changes to update their notes, rather than ‘reinventing the wheel’ each year. Another important novel feature of the wiki environment was that new and existing electronic learning resources (e.g. flash animations, video explanations of concepts, definitions of words) could be linked in to notes exactly when and where particular topics arise. A questionnaire was circulated electronically to students at the end of the academic year, to gauge their opinions on all the novel online resources housed in the VLE. A strong theme which emerged from this questionnaire was that students really valued the diversity of different online resources – such as flash animations, multiple choice questions, and videos – which were worked into the lecture notes, a feature which was afforded by the use of a wiki format. Future expectations This application does not have a limited life-span; a fundamental principle of using a wiki is that it can be continually modified easily, to ‘evolve’ and stay current. At least in the case of a wiki within a Sakai environment, the whole wiki can be ‘cloned’ and a new VLE for the following year created. Because the lecture notes do change slightly from year to year, it would be ideal if lecturers could ‘log-in’ and make the changes to their lecture notes themselves, although there has been some reluctance to do this so far, and at present lecturers give updated versions of lecture notes to a course administrator, who makes the necessary changes in the wiki. Along with the questionnaire, we have site usage data, which logs the frequency at which different wiki pages or resources linked from wiki pages are accessed. This combination of data has helped to highlight which types of resources students prefer to use, and which topics they find troublesome. This information is being fed back in to development of further learning resources to add to the wiki for the coming academic year. There are no issues with third party service providers for the technology we use, as the wiki tool here is part of a Sakai virtual learning environment. Sakai is not commercial software, but ‘community source’ software being continually developed and refined by a global network of participant universities. The wiki tool was developed at CARET and has proved popular worldwide, so it is likely to remain a Sakai ‘tool’ for the foreseeable future. However, you do not need to be a Sakai user to use a wiki, and there are a lot of good, free web-based third party wiki services available online (hosting many different users’ wikis, such sites are known as ‘wiki farms’); as wikis are relatively new, some caution should perhaps be exercised if using a wiki farm, as none of these providers are very established yet as businesses, and if the site folded, your wiki could potentially disappear. If you are more
technically-minded, the best solution for future reliability would be to acquire some well tried-and-tested open-source wiki software, such as MediaWiki, which the website Wikipedia uses and is freely available, and to run the wiki on your own web space. Conclusions & recommendations Transforming lecture notes from pdf files into a wiki has changed the course resources from being a collection of individual files into a network of topics. The wiki format is particularly amenable to integrating other electronic learning resources, and this richness of an online environment has been very well received by both students and staff. If you would like any further information about our experiences using a wiki, my email address is klj33@cam.ac.uk More information about the Plant Science Pedagogy Project and be found at the Teaching for Learning Network website, http://www.tfln.org
Web 2.0 definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2
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