A wiki (Wikipedia) is an online writing space that multiple contributors can share and edit. A student or group of students can use it to create and collaborate on a resource on a particular topic.
Advantages & Challenges
Advantages
Challenges
Advantages
Using Wikis as a form of assessment helps to evaluate help students’ critical thinking alongside editing, reviewing, collaboration, and technology exploration.
Wikis are very engaging, letting students actively participate in learning, sharing ideas, and practicing various skills, which helps develop both subject-specific and generic graduate qualities.
Writing together on a wiki helps students learn from each other, improving their understanding of writing processes, effective reasoning, and assessment criteria.
Challenges
Learning to write, establish social writing spaces, and build trust in collaborative environments can time-consuming.
Assessing collaborative learning can be difficult. It requires clear guidelines, assessment briefs and grading rubrics.
Students may not want to share their research, for fear that it will be plagiarised, over-edited or deleted, resulting in unfair assessment.
Tips for Use
Wikis can be used as a collaborative research writing assessment. Students could work together to research a topic and then develop a wiki page with their findings.
Another way wikis could be used for assessment is to do weekly posts either individually or as a group. The posts could involve students summarising or reflecting on lecture or reading materials.
The following is a list of tips to help you when designing this form of assessment:
Use open-ended tasks/topics that allow for multiple perspectives and problems to be researched and discussed.
Be sure to structure the assessment and give clear guidelines.
Provide students with examples of wikis that have been developed.
When using this form of assessment as a group-based assessment, ensure that you consider students role and participation in the assessment. You could get students to identify their role in the group and/or identify and discuss their contribution.
Develop a clear grading rubric for this assessment.
