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Researching and Sharing – Business School Students
Creating a Wiki Glossary
Andrea Gorra and Ollie Jones
Faculty of Business and Law, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK
gorra@leedsmet.ac.uk
o.jones@leedsmet.ac.uk
Abstract: Often students find that the terminology involved in a new subject can be a barrier to learning, Some
theorists term this 'cognitive load' - a high amount of information that the brain has to process before it can begin
to construct new knowledge. Glossaries have been used in many different educational contexts; however
traditional glossaries are passive and have less capability to promote student engagement. This paper outlines a
small scale study in a UK business school that used a small wiki situated within the Virtual Learning Environment
to encourage students to construct their own glossary at the start of a module. Whilst many studies have looked
at use of wikis in student work, especially collaborative projects, relatively few have investigated the use of wikis
for constructing simple glossary entries created by students. In our study each student was allocated a particular
subject related term. The students were instructed to construct a wiki entry describing what the term meant, citing
at least two appropriate references. The study was evaluated by a variety methods including quantitative analysis
of the Virtual Learning Environment usage and access statistics, alongside qualitative and quantitative survey
data. Generally the quality of the entries was very high and students indicated that writing the wiki glossary
entries helped them to understand the terminology of the new subject. Students stated that they had read a
number of entries over the course of the module and some chose to reference the wiki in their final written
assignment. Our research indicates that students found creating the wiki more useful than the finished resource
itself.
Keywords: wiki, glossary, active learning, VLE
1. Background
Often students find that the terminology involved in a new subject can be a barrier to learning about
concepts (see for example Wandersee, 1988; Lidbury and Zhang, 2008). Theorists such as Sweller
(1994) determine this as ‘cognitive load’ – the higher the amount of information the brain the must
process before it can begin to construct knowledge. Glossaries have been used in many different
educational contexts (Hall, 2002) to enable more effective dialogue between tutor and student.
Laurillard (2002) believes that the use of glossaries can help with the students’ learning process.
However traditional glossaries are passive and have less capability to promote student engagement,
especially at the beginning of studying a subject.
This paper outlines a small scale study in a Business School in the North of England that used wikis
to encourage students to construct their own glossary at the start of a module. A wiki is a website that
can be modified and contributed to by internet users (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011). Wikis and
other social networking sites are part of a host of applications that are also known as Web 2.0
technologies (O'Reilly, 2005).
The rationale for introducing a glossary task was to foster enquiry based learning (Khan and
O’Rourke, 2005) in order to engage students early on in the 12 week Operations management
module and to help the students to familiarise themselves with the terminology of this new subject.
Whilst a lot of studies have looked at use of wikis in student work , especially collaborative projects,
relatively few have looked at using wikis for constructing simple glossary entries. In those studies that
do, such as Cubric (2010), the glossary element forms a small part of the overall research.
The students taking part in this study were in their second year of study (Level 5), from two separate
undergraduate business courses, namely Business Studies, and Business and Management studies.
The module taken was ‘Operations Management’ (OM) which was taught in the first semester at
Leeds Metropolitan University. The OM module was delivered by 5 tutors over 12 classes and was
delivered by using lectures and tutorials.
The assessment was a multi-media case study accessible the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)
and via an additional DVD. The case study aimed at developing the students’ employability skills and
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