BUSINESS STUDENT COLLABORATIVE WORK

SUPPORTED BY MOODLE WIKI

Viktorija Sulčič

University of Primorska, Faculty of Management Koper, Slovenia

Keywords: e-Learning, Moodle, Wiki, Collaborative Work.

Abstract: The first part of the paper presents wiki as a Web 2.0 tool in general and also its potential use in the field of

education. Our presentation continues with our wiki experiences, particularly how wiki, as a module of

open-source learning management system Moodle, can support collaborative student work. The paper

concludes with the presentation of the research results of Moodle wiki usage by business school students.

Despite the fact that Moodle wiki is not as user-friendly as Media Wiki, it can successfully and efficiently

support student collaborative work.

1 INTRODUCTION

After the Tim Berners-Lee World-Wide-Web

revolution in the beginning of the nineties of the

previous century, the Internet became more

accessible to the general public. In 2004, the term

Web 2.0 was created as a result of the brainstorming

session between O’Reilly and MediaLive

International (O’Reilly 2005). In the last three years,

this phenomenon attracted a great deal of attention

(Nass and Levitt 2007, 4). Furthermore, Sonesh

(2005) talks about the second Internet revolution.

According to Whatis.com

, Web 2.0 is a term for

advanced Internet technology and applications

including blogs, wikis, RSS and social bookmarking.

Greater collaboration among Internet users, content

providers and enterprises is emphasized as the most

significant difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0

(ibidem). At this point, it should be noted that the

term Web 1.0 had not been used before the creation

of the term Web 2.0. According to Nass and Levitt

(2007, 4), the common characteristic of Web 2.0

technologies/concepts is its user centered nature.

Users can easily create content, publish it on the

Internet and share it with other users. Web 2.0

represents a different use of the Web, which is more

collaborative and more interactive.

Web 2.0 technologies, such as blogs and wikis,

are also widely adopted by businesses. Blogs and

http://whatis.techtarget.com/

wikis are useful for sharing of unstructured

information (Whatis.com) and supporting

collaborative work in working environments.

Nowadays, more and more enterprises write their

own blogs

. Richardson (2006, 62) discusses large

enterprises such as Disney

, McDonalds

, Sony

and

BMW

that use wikis in order to manage documents

and information. The extent of Web 2.0 technologies

usage in the business world influenced our decision

to implement Web 2.0 technologies in our course

curriculum. It is especially important that business

school students and graduates acquire knowledge

and skills related to the effective use of the

mentioned technologies. According to the fact (Dale

1969, 108) that learners remember more if they learn

from their own experience, Web 2.0 technologies

were implemented in a way that enabled students to

actively use these technologies in order to prepare

different tasks and assignments. We implemented

the use of blogs in two postgraduate courses that are

more research oriented. In these cases, students used

blogs to collect different resources, to collaborate,

and to develop new knowledge. For undergraduate

students, Wiki was implemented as a collaborative

tool in certain courses in the field of business

informatics. Due to the fact that Moodle is used as

the faculty official learning management system

http://www.asia.socialtext.net/bizblogs/index.cgi

http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

http://mcdonalds.wikia.com/

http://sony.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.bmwwikiwiki.com/

213

Sul

c V. (2010).

BUSINESS STUDENT COLLABORATIVE WORK SUPPORTED BY MOODLE WIKI.

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 213-219

 SciTePress

(LMS), we decided to use Moodle wiki with the

purpose of supporting student teamwork.

The paper discusses our implementation of

Moodle wiki and its impact on teaching and

learning. Moodle wiki was used in the framework of

one obligatory undergraduate course and two

elective undergraduate courses. Furthermore,

Moodle wiki was used by students of one elective

postgraduate course during the time this paper was

written. The conclusion of the course is usually

followed by an evaluation of the course. The

evaluation questionnaire contained questions related

to the use of wiki. Obtained data was then used in

order to either confirm or reject the following

hypotheses:

 wiki is a suitable tool for the support of student

collaborative teamwork and can substitute

classical teamwork performed in a classroom

 wiki usage improves collaboration among

students and teachers

 the quality of student assignments increases due

to the organization and transparency enabled by

wiki.

Data collected by the survey was processed with

SPPS program (ver. 17.0) and the results are

presented in tables and figures.

2 WIKIS

2.1 Wiki Development and its

Proliferation

Wiki was first used as an authoring tool used to

manage unstructured data by Ward Cunningham in

1995. The word »wiki-wiki« in Hawaiian means

»quick« (Richardson 2006, 59), which depicts the

nature of wiki that helps us manage content quickly

and easily. The most known wiki environment is

free multilingual encyclopaedia Wikipedia

, where

anyone from anywhere may contribute to its content.

The negative aspect of this Wikipedia freedom is

reflected in consequent scepticism, especially among

professionals, regarding the reliability of Wikipedia

content. Alex Halavais, professor at the University

of Buffalo, tested Wikipedia by entering 13 various

erroneous posts. All entered errors were fixed within

a couple of hours (Richardson 2006, 61). Quick

response to such attempts is one of the improved

features of Wikipedia. Richardson (2006, 61)

reported about a Wikipedia post regarding the Indian

Ocean earthquake that struck at the end of December

http://www.wikipedia.org/

2004. The first Wikipedia 76-word post was created

approximately 9 hours after the tragic event. In the

next 24 hours, the post was edited more than 400

times and had grown to approximately 3,000 words.

The photos, charts and other graphics were also

edited. Forty-eight hours after the first post, the post

had grown to over 6,500 words and had been edited

1,200 times. It is amazing how quickly such events

appear in the Wikipedia and how quickly the content

is edited, corrected or improved. Regardless, public

opinion about the trustworthiness of Wikipedia has

not significantly improved. Furthermore, certain

sceptics do not even change their opinion despite the

results of the comparison between Encyclopaedia

Britannica and Wikipedia performed by the

magazine Nature (Giles 2005). The comparison

concentrated on 43 posts from both encyclopaedias

and the results proved Wikipedia to be only slightly

less accurate than the commercial Encyclopaedia

Britannica.

Wikipedia is based on the fact that individuals

work and collaborate, even if they do not know each

other. Together they create entries that represent the

best effort of the entire group, and not merely the

contribution of a single person. The phenomenon

was described by Surowiecki (2005) as the wisdom

of crowds.

The number of posts in Wikipedia grows on a

daily basis

. At the end of February 2009, there were

2,762,158 posts in English Wikipedia (25. 2. 2009)

and by May of the same year, the number of content

pages reached 2,870,805 (7. 5. 2009). Over one

hundred thousand new content pages were added in

mere two months and a half.

Although Wikipedia is the most recognized wiki

environment, there are other interesting wikis –

Wiktionary

, Wikiquote

, Wikibooks

etc. Some

wikis, like Wikipedia, are freely accessible and

anyone can contribute to its content. However,

certain profit and non-profit organizations use wiki

software in order to manage internal unstructured

data. There are over 100 wiki software applications

on the market and most of them are open sourced.

The most popular is MediaWiki

that was

developed to support free encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

In addition to its public use, MediaWiki can also be

used in restricted environments. For example,

MediaWiki has been used by United States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Main_Page

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiquote

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki

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Intelligence Community (IC) since 2006.

Intellipedia

, as they named their wiki, is not freely

accessible and is used by IC analysts, working

groups and engineers to collaborate and share

unstructured data

. According to the IC report,

»Intellipedia provides a cost-effective platform to

access expertise whenever it resides across the IC«

2.2 Wiki in Education

In the previous chapter, we mentioned comparisons

performed between free and commercial

encyclopaedias. The comparison displayed that

Wikipedia is slightly less accurate than

Encyclopaedia Britannica. Although it has been

proven that the reliability of Wikipedia data is not as

low as presumed, teachers at all levels of education

warn students not to use Wikipedia's data as the

primary source for their assignments and projects.

Wikipedia's data may be used only as a starting point

and complemented by other more reliable sources of

information – school textbooks, books, journals and

other printed or internet sources. The new challenge

dealing with the use of Wikipedia in education rose

from this doubt in the reliability of information

provided by Wikipedia. Students may test Wikipedia

data about a topic they are studying in class with the

use of other sources and consequently improve or

correct the Wikipedia content if they find any errors

or deficiencies as a part of their homework. They

can work either individually or in small groups.

Furthermore, students may post results of their

researches in the Wikipedia. With the usage of

wikis, students learn how to publish the content and

how to develop and use collaborative skills, they

learn to negotiate with others in order to agree on

correctness, meaning and relevance (Richardson

2006, 65).

Since wikis are easily accessible and all

information and data can easily be managed and

quickly updated, wikis may also be used as school

textbooks. This idea was realised by the California

Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP)

. The aim

of the COSTP project is to employ the advantages of

open source content and innovative licensing tools to

reduce California's K-12 textbook costs, to increase

their content and to avoid the shortages of K-12

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellipedia

https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-

archive/2008-featured-story-archive/intellipedia-marks-

second-anniversary.html

https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-

archive/2008-featured-story-archive/intellipedia-marks-

second-anniversary.html

http://www.opensourcetext.org/index.htm

textbooks. Some of the freely accessible textbooks

from Wikibooks

can also be used in either real or

web based classrooms. Free access to a wide range

of textbooks is especially important for less

developed countries where there is a lack of

financial resources to prepare quality school

textbooks. However, the textbook language may

cause a serious obstacle in non-English speaking

countries.

Introducing wikis in the learning process is an

opportunity to introduce students to the concepts of

open source software, community collaboration,

respect for other people's ideas, intellectual property

etc. (Richardson 2006, 67).

Teacher may use wikis to take group lecture

notes, support group project management, perform

brainstorming, prepare content that will later be

published in others wikis, such as Wikipedia, and

support collaborative work between teachers and

employees (Cole and Foster 2007, 165-166).

In continuation, the use of wiki, as a tool to

support collaborative student work, is presented.

3 COLLABORATIVE WORK

WITH MOODLE WIKI

3.1 Student Collaborative Work

We have been using Moodle at our faculty from the

moment we decided to implement e-learning,

namely since the academic year of 2003/2004. We

started to experiment with Moodle in the framework

of the undergraduate course of e-business. E-

learning is a type of e-business; therefore, the e-

business course was the most appropriate course to

be performed online. Students would thus learn the

course topics through their own experiences using

the Internet technologies. The Internet technologies

were used even before Moodle has been selected as

the faculty’s learning platform. During the e-

business course, students prepare different group

assignments, which are individually graded and then

together compose the final course grade. Students

may work in groups in different ways. They may

prepare their group assignments working together in

the classical classrooms or they divide the

assignments among the members and then complete

the assignments at home. In the latter case, the group

leader combines the completed individual

assignments. Irrespective of the way the students

accomplish their group assignments two main pro-

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

BUSINESS STUDENT COLLABORATIVE WORK SUPPORTED BY MOODLE WIKI

215

blems are presented:

 the inactive students can easily be hidden by

active students who work instead of them. Active

students usually do not like to report the

inactivity of their colleagues.

 submission of group assignments via e-mail

often causes problems – students stated that the

assignments were mailed in time; however, the

teacher did not receive them in time.

Due to the above stated problems, we were

looking for different ways of supporting group work.

By introducing Moodle in the learning process, new

opportunities for the support of group work were

created. The students accomplished their

assignments through discussion in the Moodle

Forum; forum discussions were divided according to

the created groups. The group discussions may be

seen only by group members and by the teacher. At

the end of the week, the group leader wrote a

discussion summary and submitted it in the Moodle

activity Assignment. The teacher assessed the

discussion summary and only the students that were

involved in the forum discussion were rewarded

with points, which would add to their final grade. In

this way, we eliminated the possibility that inactive

students would be awarded undeserved points.

Sometimes, the group successfulness depends on

how the group leader is able to write the summary.

Since only the summary is assessed, it may occur

that the student may be assessed better if the partial

discussion would also be assessed. The discussion in

forums was monitored by a teacher who could, if

necessary, propose students to discuss a different

perspective or change the discussion in case they

were not on the right track. The students appreciated

the teacher’s involvement in student discussions. In

case the group discussions were very intense, the

group leader found it difficult to join the discussion

posts into a relevant summary that was assessed by

the teacher. Furthermore, tracing numerous student

discussions at courses with a large number of

students was fairly difficult for the teacher as well.

Therefore, it became necessary to find a new way of

supporting student group work. In 2007/2008, when

Moodle 1.6.5 was used, we decided to use the wiki

activity for this purpose. Moodle wiki in version

1.6.5 had a problem when two or more students

edited a single wiki page at the same time. Namely,

only the changes of the student who first saved the

edited wiki page were recorded. Changes made by

other students – wiki authors, were lost. The

problem was serious, because students were not

notified that another user is already editing a

particular page. The error has been corrected with

the introduction of a new Moodle version. In

2008/2009, we started using the Moodle version

1.9.4 that was upgraded with user lock

announcement.

The feature of simultaneous multi-user editing,

as it occurs in GoogleDocs, is not possible in

Moodle wiki so far and it presents the main obstacle

for wider use of wiki among Moodle users.

3.2 Introducing Moodle Wiki in a

Business School

Moodle wiki was first introduced in the course of e-

business in 2007/2008. During the course

development, the guidelines for the creation of

student papers were prepared. The guidelines

contain several screen shots about wiki page editing

with emphasis on the wiki syntax. Furthermore, the

screen cast about wiki editing was recorded. During

the first face-to-face meeting, wiki usage was

presented by the teacher. However, in the next

academic year the mentioned face-to-face meeting

was not performed in some courses, because we

wanted to encourage the students to learn how to use

wiki by themselves. Students learn how to use

Moodle wiki from paper-based guidelines and from

screen cast, both available in the Moodle course.

Moodle wiki was implemented in three

undergraduate courses – Business informatics, E-

business, E-learning and also in the course

Management of e-learning, which was carried out

for the postgraduate students. In the E-business

course, Moodle wiki was used to support all student

group activities, while in other courses Moodle wiki

was used only for the first activity where students

presented themselves. In all cases, the first Moodle

wiki page was prepared by the teacher (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Moodle wiki first page.

In this way, the students could easily edit their

CSEDU 2010 - 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

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first Moodle wiki page by clicking on the question

mark and thus became more comfortable with wiki

editing. The mentioned guidelines and screen cast

helped them improve their first wiki pages in the

following days. Figure 2 displays that Group 1 has

already composed their first wiki page, while the

other groups have not yet started editing (question

mark next to the group name).

Students usually do not have any problems with

editing the wiki pages, because the editing process

and the toolbar are similar to editing and toolbar in

the most commonly used word processors (Figure

2). The wiki text can easily be formatted, external

URL may be added, and different wiki pages can

also be easily connected. The new wiki pages can be

created (and connected) by putting words between

square brackets ([]). When the target wiki page name

is not the same as the link word displayed on the

source wiki page, the vertical bar (|) is used to

separate text and the name of the target wiki page

(Figure 2).

Figure 2: Moodle wiki in edit mode.

Students who are skilled in HTML language can

also edit wiki pages in HTML code. Furthermore,

students can compose wiki content in different

HTML editors and then copy the content to the wiki

editing window in Moodle.

3.3 Group Work in Moodle Wiki

According to the E-business course curriculum, it is

expected that students prepare six different group

assignments. The course in Moodle is designed to be

performed in separate groups. This means that the

entire group work can be followed only by group

members and the teacher/tutor. The wiki activity is

performed in separate groups as well. Group

separation helps the teacher to focus easily on the

particular group activity and also on the activity of

The text “fairy tale hero“ contains the link to the wiki page

named “Peter Pan”.

each group member. The teacher prepares the wiki

front page that contains the basic guidelines for each

assignment (Figure 3). Detailed guidelines for each

assignment were delivered to students through

Moodle during each week.

Figure 3: Wiki front page.

Students were encouraged to write some draft

notes about their assignment at the beginning of the

week. They could also write notes about the planned

group assignment progress – member tasks and due

dates. Any group member could add and correct the

wiki content at any time from anywhere. This wiki

feature was accepted really well by the students.

Furthermore, the teacher was able to review all these

notes and consequently intervene if the assignment

did not progress according to the study guidelines.

The wiki History view enables the teacher to view

the entire history of a particular wiki page – who

edited what and when. Student participation in wiki

activity could also be monitored through Report

feature. Using History and Reports helps teacher

separate active students from inactive students and

award points only to those students who really

contributed to the group assignment work.

 Despite all mentioned wiki advantages, the wiki

in Moodle 1.9.4 still has some disadvantages:

 it is still not possible for two or more students to

edit a particular wiki page at the same time

 wiki student activities cannot be assessed within

wiki. The Assignment–off-line activity was used

to record the points students gained with their

wiki activity.

3.4 The Student Opinion

In the last week of each course performed online,

students are invited to fulfil the survey about the

course. For the students of the elective course (Table

1), a group of questions about the use of wiki, as

presented in chapter 3.2, was included in the survey.

BUSINESS STUDENT COLLABORATIVE WORK SUPPORTED BY MOODLE WIKI

217

Table 1: Students included in survey.

Academic year

Students enrolled

Survey response (in %)

2007/2008

83.9

2008/2009

81.7

In the first year of wiki usage (Table 2), more

students were not familiar with wiki (66.5%) than in

the second year of its usage (40.8%).

Table 2: Wiki opinion.

2007/2008

2008/2009

Prior to course

enrolment, I did not

know what wiki is.

66.5

40.8

Prior to course

enrolment, I had a

different image about

wiki.

25.5

40.8

My opinion about wiki

did not change after the

conclusion of the course.

8.5

18.4

Table 3: Wiki suitability for the preparation and

submission of assignments.

2007/2008

2008/2009

Wiki makes our work easier.

66.0

73.5

Preparing the assignments in

wiki is easier that it is in

Word.

23.4

20.4

Preparing the assignments in

Word would be easier.

10.6

2.0

I prefer to prepare an

assignment in Word.

4.1

Wiki was the main student activity used in the e-

business course to prepare the expected assignments

according to the course curriculum. The majority of

the students (80.9% respectively 81.6%) agreed that

wiki is an appropriate activity for the e-business

course (Table 4). Not a single student believed that

wiki is not an appropriate activity or it is too

difficult for e-business students.

Students improved their wiki assignments with

different external links on topic related web pages.

They also inserted different pictures and photos

related to the assignment content. Inserting picture

materials in wiki with the student role is not as

simple as it is with the teacher role. All picture

materials have to be published on the web if the

student would like to insert them in a particular wiki

Table 4: Wiki appropriateness for e-business course.

2007/2008

2008/2009

Wiki has to be used by the

next student generations.

80.9

81.6

Wiki is an appropriate

activity, but more

introduction regarding its

usage is necessary.

12.7

16.4

Wiki activity should only be

an elective course activity.

6.4

2.0

Wiki is not an appropriate

activity for the e-business

course.

Wiki activity is to difficult to

be used in the e-business

course.

page. However, the teacher can upload desired

pictures from his/her computer, while the student

role does not permit the insertion of a picture or a

photo from a personal computer. Some students used

other wiki design features (colour, different fonts,

tables etc.) in order to make their wiki pages more

interesting and impressive. At the end of the course,

the students were invited to assess their satisfaction

with the wiki design on a 5-degree scale (5=very

satisfactory, 1=not satisfactory). In the academic

year 2007/2008, the students assessed the wiki

design with 4.2 (SD=0.9, 95% confidence interval

4.0–4.4) and in 2008/2009 with 4.3 (SD=0.7, 95%

confidence interval 4.1–4.5).

The most exposed wiki feature was the

possibility of continual wiki content improvement –

students were able to add, change and improve their

wiki content from anywhere and at any time.

Continuous teacher involvement in the learning

process helped students additionally improve their

wiki assignments. Students approved the wiki's

simplicity as well.

The students complained regarding the picture

insertion process. In the academic year 2007/2008,

we received a lot of complaints concerning the multi

user editing problems, where only the changes made

by the student who was the first to save a particular

wiki page were recorded, while changes made by

other students were lost without any previous

warning.

We would like to uncover the characteristics of

the students who favoured the use of wiki.

Therefore, a new variable from wiki suitability, were

added (Table 3), wiki appropriateness for e-business

course (Table 4) and student satisfaction with wiki

design, was composed. With the use of correlation

CSEDU 2010 - 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

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analysis, we found that students who favoured wikis

also favoured online study and did not have any

problems with regular weekly activities. Both

correlations were statistically significant.

4 CONCLUSIONS

The first positive experience from both, student and

teacher perspective influenced the decision

regarding the use of wiki in the elective course as a

managing tool for unstructured data in the second

year. Moodle wiki can be used by a very small

closed group of users, which offers users (students)

more privacy and more confidence in their

preparation of assignments.

Based on the data analysis, we can conclude that

wiki is a suitable tool for the support of student

group work in an online environment and can easily

replace off-line group work activity. More than 80%

of the students included in the research agreed that

editing wiki improved collaboration among students

and also cooperation between the teacher and the

students if the teacher was actively present in the

online course. The teacher is able to monitor student

progress in the assignment preparation process and

he/she can guide the students to follow study guides

more carefully and therefore improve their

assignments. Using wikis to accomplish the

assignments helps students prepare more quality

work than they were able following the classical

way.

Uncovering inactive students was approved by

the students and motivated them to become more

involved in the group work, since the online groups

work better than do groups in a live environment.

In the next Moodle version, wiki should be

improved even more. The most desired feature is the

possibility that two or more users could not edit a

particular wiki page at the same time. The wiki

assignment ability will thus become a desired

teacher feature as well.

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