Wikis as a mediation platform for developing learning communities: The WEKI framework

Abstract

Wikis provide unique affordances for collaboration and delivering public products and have been explored extensively as learning spaces. Most studies have underlined that triggering productive collaborative learning in wikis may be challenging and that an effective learning design is an important prerequisite for their successful exploitation. Several related design guidelines have been proposed such as setting group goals, design a rich context and problem, motivating progress monitoring, establishing structured collaboration processes etc. By following these guidelines and taking advantage of community of learners principles, we have designed the instructional approach WEKI which aims to help students to familiarize with a new learning domain by co-developing an open educational book about the domain. Twenty-four 4th-year undergraduate students of an Electrical and Computer Engineering Department applied the WEKI approach and formed a learning community for 15 weeks. The undergraduates successfully managed to design and develop an e-book and relevant learning resources about Microsoft Kodu in the context of a Teaching IT course. Interviews about students’ perceptions of WEKI were conducted with all of the students before and after the project. In the beginning, students considered the proposed framework as a complicated and challenging process but in the end, the vast majority of students stated that their experience and the final products exceeded their best expectations. Our results indicate that well-structured instructional approaches focusing on communities of learners’ principles, may realize the potential of wikis.