Use of Wikis in Online Education Group Projects
Abstract: Many online educational courses make use of group projects in which teams of students collaborate to produce a product, conduct a case study, or answer open-ended questions posed by the instructor. The group projects may be associated with a single lesson or run sequentially over the entire period of the course. A wiki is an excellent tool to support the collaboration activities during student group projects. The wiki provides a shared workspace where students can share the results of their research, pose their proposed responses, construct the final product, and build and display their presentation of results. The document may easily include graphics and links to other websites. This Roundtable will demonstrate how a Wiki is being used in a current online class. It will describe the group projects assigned to teams of students, how the Wiki was structured for their deliberations, and the various ways in which the different teams create their final group products.