Course Wiki

Feature Description

A Course Wiki allows learners to contribute, edit, and curate a shared repository of peer-to-peer knowledge. A wiki allows for greater flexibility in knowledge and information sharing between learners than a discussion, and is more presentational in nature.

Typical uses of an online course wiki include:

Content Repository: The wiki acts as a repository for course materials, lecture notes, assignments, and other relevant resources. These resources can be accessed and edited by authorized users.
Collaboration: A wiki encourages collaborative learning and knowledge sharing. Learners and instructors can work together to improve and expand upon the course content.
Documentation: The wiki can provide a space for documenting important information such as course syllabi, schedules, and guidelines, making it easy for learners to stay informed about the course
Research: The wiki can also serve as a research tool, allowing students to gather and organize information for assignments and projects.

Wikis typically have an extremely high administrative burden in setup, maintenance, learner education (i.e. how they should contribute to the wiki), and “seeding”, leading to them being under-used in most courses.

Pedagogical Assessment

Is there research to support the need of this feature in delivering pedagogical value and impact?

The overwhelming consensus in academic circles is that Wikis are an extremely powerful pedagogic tool which can be used to foster collaborative learning, present group project work, and generally allow co-creation of learning content. However, barriers exist to effective Wiki use, chiefly the staff time required to effectively set up and moderate a wiki, the requirement for high learner engagement for a wiki to have value, the potential for wiki vandalism, and generally issues that would be expected from having a tool exposed to users on the internet. Having a course wiki is effectively an extremely high-cost, high-engagement commitment, which may be why they are almost never used outside of degree-level, academic institution-led courses.

Of the online-focused course development resources and open courses spot-checked (not all listed here), none of the courses that were created by non-traditional instructors recommended wiki use, while online courses created by traditional institutions all strongly recommended having course wikis. Somewhat entertainingly, a few instructional design courses on http://edX.org wrote about the importance of having a course wiki, while not actually providing a course wiki. This is likely because of this mismatch between the needs of open online courses and the needs of higher education courses.

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Subject-Matter Alignment

What types of courses/subjects does this feature support?

Wikis can be used for any subject for collaborative learning, and are not inherently tied to any particular subject. However, the nature of being a collaborative creation tool inherently makes them more effective with cohorts of learners that expect to use technology to write and create. Technical and business courses typically have higher wiki engagement, for example.

As there is a requirement to “train” learners in using the wiki effectively and constructively, and as such wikis are unsuitable for short-form or “bite-sized” learning, casual learners, self–paced learning, and the corporate education use-case. This is not an issue for higher education institutions as their courses are typically instructor-led, set the expectation of being full-time or at least extremely time-intensive, and run for full semesters or school years, allowing time for wikis to be learned and used effectively.

Is the Wiki feature necessary?

Wikis are absolutely necessary for traditional academic institutions, but completely unused outside of this context. In higher education, their status is pretty much undisputed, citing improved learner outcomes, higher learner engagement, community benefits, and a wide range of other positive outcomes.

In customer and corporate training, open access courses, and other less traditional contexts, wikis are seen as an unsustainable draw on staff resources, requiring constant monitoring for questions, issues and vandalism, and significant work to seed with content in order to promote learner engagement. Wikis are almost never actually used because of this outside of higher education, and when they are used, learner engagement is regularly too low to justify their inclusion. This is likely why only platforms that are focused on the higher education use-case typically include a Wiki offering or plugin.

The Wiki is an interesting case where it’s a complete 50/50 depending on the use-case. It is either completely useless, or completely mandatory, and there’s not much in between.