Gearing up for spring semester? Interested in trying something different? Instructors have been incorporating wikis into their courses to allow students to work collaboratively, and wikis are available through Blackboard at Duke. However, wikis can be used to organize the entire course.
Sandra Porter shares her experiences using a wiki (PBwiki) to teach bioinformatics in her blog, Discovering Biology in a Digital World. She describes how she set up her course, using her syllabus as the main page with links to her materials. She says she “used to try and use Blackboard for this, but pbwiki is so much easier to use. ” For assessments, she used Google forms embedded into the course wiki.
Dr. Porter generously shares her lessons learned along the way. She described a problem caused by a web browser, and finally, she describes a better way to manage files and folders within her course. In addition, she answers readers’ questions in the comments. Read all 3 entries for a thoughtful introduction to using a wiki to organize a course. Dr. Porter currently develops instructional materials for 21st century biology at Geospiza Inc.
The adventurous proponent of open (notebook) science, Jean-Claude Bradley, has been teaching organic chemistry using a wiki for several years at Drexel University. Fittingly, his courses are open: browse Organic Chemistry 1 or Organic Chemistry 2 for ideas. He uses Wikispaces to host his wikis, and accompanies the courses with blog posts.
Wikis are wonderful tools for collaboration, which may be ideal for students to learn. However, as Dr. Porter details, wiki pages can have permissions set so that they are private within the class, or private between the instructor and the student. In addition, because the instructor can access the page history, changes can be monitored. Will a wiki fit your course?
Thanks for the mention. Because the classes repeat every term I don’t use the blogs for teaching that much anymore. But the wiki is still a great tool to organize a class and adapt quickly.