Kelsey van Haaster and Michael Shimmins
Flexible Learning and Teaching Program, Information Technology Services [HREF2], Monash University [HREF3], Victoria Australia
During 2002 and 2003 sta ff and students at Monash University, were offered LMS services via WebCT’s Campus Edition product. The popularity of the service increased over this period of time to the extent that the provision of a more scalable solution became imperative. For a range of reasons, outside the scope of this discussion, WebCT’s enterprise level product, WebCT Vista was chosen in late 2003. A three year capital project, to implement and then deliver this service commenced in semester 1 2004 ( Monash University Studies Online , 2006). The service is delivered by the Flexible Learning and Teaching Program (FLT) which is also responsible for delivering the my.monash staff and student portal.
Generally, the move to the enterprise product has been well received by both sta ff and students, a number of technical and administrative issues were resolved and the product has proven to be suffciently scalable. Unfortunately, the staff response to the range of native teaching tools has not been quite so enthusiastic. A particular problem has been the lack of a usable collaborative workspace for students working in teams. The Campus Edition project did provide such a space, referred to as the Student Presentations Tool. Which, although fairly unsophisticated did permit students to share files, and importantly, allowed staff to assess project work within the LMS system. The lack of a collaborative tool has been a barrier to full usage of the system for staff teaching or supervising student projects, and has meant that students have been denied the beneft of being able to access all their learning materials in a single place.
The need for suitable collaborative teaching and learning tools is not limited to those institutions using LMS technology, and one very popular approach has been the use of second generation tools such as Wiki’s and Blogs ,(GodwinJones, 2003). A number of authors have documented their experiences with the use of Wiki’s to support student collaboration in a variety educational settings across a wide range of educational felds, including, family studies (Bold, 2006), English language studies, (Wang et al., 2005) and Nursing (Skiba, 2005). The use of Wiki technology in the commercial world is also generating considerable interest, one of the best known examples is Wikipedia ( Wikipedia , 2005) an on line collaborative encyclopedia. One example of particular interest in the context of this research is proposed in (Fernandez, 2004) where a wiki is used as a tool for an open source software development team, in order to document work practices and procedures in order to develop a scaffolding which can be used for the management of software development projects.
This project will take advantage of the power of the enterprise LMS and the wiki and attempt to combine them in such a way that staff and students can access the benefts both systems. A wiki will be added to the available tool set provided by the WebCT Vista product and students in a single unit will be asked to use the tool as both a repository for their work and as a framework to guide their both their practice and their learning. The staff and students response and use of the tool will be analysed and evaluated in order to determine whether the tool should be made available for general use.
The staff and students participating in this project and undertaking a software engineering unit, as part of an undergraduate degree in information technology. The student cohorts are distributed across 3 separate campuses, two in Melbourne Australia and one in Johannesburg South Africa. There are several local teaching staff on each campus, and the unit is delivered face to face, using MUSO to provide all learning and assessment materials. There are approximately 120 students in total, and they are required to work in teams of two in order to develop a software application which demonstrates their use of software engineering principles.
The students will be asked to use the wiki as a framework for their project, both as a repository of their documents and as a record of their activities. Their use of the wiki as a tool will not be formally assessed, but the work delivered via the wiki forms a signifcant part of the assessment for the unit.
One of the benefts of moving to the enterprise LMS product has been the availability of API’s which allow the application to be enhanced and customised. A number of third party products are already available for this purpose, and most institutions including Monash, have developed middleware which allows the product to interact with other university systems. Of particular interest in this context is the idea of application bridging, which allows third party applications to appear inside the Vista frame set as though they were native to the Vista environment ( WebCT Powerlinks Development , 2005). In order to add real value to the LMS these third party applications must also behave as though they are native to the Vista environment. Therefore the use of open source software and the flexibility it provides will be critical to the project. The wiki application which will be used in this project is Twiki, an open source wiki and collaborative environment.( Twiki , n.d.)
During this pilot the degree of integration with WebCT Vista will be limited to look
and feel issues. The focus will be on making Twiki appear as an integral part of the WebCT Vista application, and providing mechanisms by which the teaching sta ff can control student access to the wiki. Students will work in teams of two and each team will have access to their own wiki web, and a minimal amount of templating will be done in order to minimise the students need to learn wiki syntax from day one. Students use of the wiki will be supported via a discussion forum available via WebCT Vista.
A number of questions about the use of this kind of collaborative tool will be investigated, in particular, we would like to know whether students fnd the new technology
confronting or difficult to use. We will be asking students for their opinions of the wiki tool at least twice during the project. We are also interested in the students behavior as collaborators in such an open environment and will be interviewing the teaching sta ff to
obtain their impressions of the tool. Should the wiki tool prove to be a successful addition to the suite of teaching and learning tools available through WebCT Vista it will be necessary to develop an administrative interface for the tool before distributing it to other
staff and students. This interface will allow teaching staff to create and confgure wiki webs and control access to them. For the purpose of the pilot, this has been achieved using a
customised Perl module.There is currently no model for the distribution, management and support of addin components for WebCT Vista within the university. A number of commercial models exist, but the suitability of these will need further evaluation, as will the viability of releasing the customised tool to the wider educational community.
Bold, M. (2006, March). Use of wikis in graduate course work. Journal of Interactive Learning Research , 17 (1), 5(10)–.
Fernandez, A. (2004). Saki the scaffolding wiki. IEEE Computer Society.
GodwinJones, R. (2003, May). Use of wikis in graduate course work. Journal of interactive learning research , 7 (2).
Monash university studies online. (2006).
Skiba, D. J. (2005, March). Do your students wiki?(emerging technologies center). Nursing Education
Perspectives , 26 (2), 120(2)–.
Twiki. (n.d.). http://twiki.org/.
Wang, H.C., Lu, C.H., Yang, J.Y., Hu, H.W., Chiou, G.F., Chiang, Y.T., et al. (2005, July 2005). An empirical exploration of using wiki in an english as a second language course.
Webct powerlinks development. (2005). http://www.webct.com/powerlinks/.
Wikipedia. (2005) . http://www.wikipedia.org/