learning - Academic Conferences Limited

Andrea Gorra and Ollie Jones
“We could see that are efforts weren't going in vain. and it's always good to see your
name somewhere”
While some less positive ones indicated that some students would have preferred to be only
presented with materials created by tutors (“I would prefer the tutors more”), while others felt the
inclusion of the wiki comments did not fit into the flow of the Operations Management lecture:
“because it was never clear and on point to the questions”
Students are not a homogenous group and some found the use of their own wiki glossary entries
embarrassing while others thought it built their confidence as the following comments show:
“it was embarrassing for those who had written them and a lot of the time it broke the
flow of the lecture”
“It helped to build students confidence”.
4. Conclusions and implications for future research
The module tutors read and marked every wiki entry and the overall tutor impression was that the
quality of the entries was generally high.
By evaluating the empirical data, we identified some answers to our initial three research questions:
1. Do students find terms, language in unfamiliar subject a barrier to learning?
Our survey confirmed our initial suspicion and findings from literature review (e.g. Lidbury and Zhang,
2008) in that students do perceive the language and definitions of a new subject area as a barrier to
both understanding and learning.
2. Can the process of constructing a glossary help learning?
The results from the survey show that students found the process of construction useful as well as the
resource itself. Qualitative comments acknowledged that constructing a wiki glossary engaged the
students. In addition, the students perceived it as positive to be able to read other students’ definition
of a key term as opposed to only having the tutor’s or text book definitions available as for example
the following comment illustrates: “Because it engaged students and gave us another students
perspective on the definitions“.
As discussed earlier, the process of constructing a glossary by the students can be seen as an
enquiry-based learning approach which expected students to do their own research on given glossary
terms. Through this process of constructing their own understanding of these terms, we believe,
similar to Laurillard (2002), that this process can help students’ learning.
The social component of learning was less pronounced in our chosen approach, as enquiry-based
learning is often carried out in small groups (see Khan and O’Rourke, 2005). However, the fact that
each wiki glossary term had several visits from other students may be an indication of an added
(small) social dimension to learning when using glossaries. The aim to increase student motivation
through enquiry-based learning (Khan and O’Rourke, 2005) appears also to have been fulfilled as the
student quote above indicates.
3. Is the outcome of a student generated glossary a useful/used resource for students?
Our students perceived the final glossary to be a useful resource, as the survey findings show. For
example Figure 7 indicates that the majority of students agree with the statement “I found the wiki
glossary a useful learning resource for the module”. However, a significant number of students did not
feel that the wiki glossary entries helped them with the assessment (for detail see Figure 6).
Overall it can be concluded, that the actual creation of the wiki resource, i.e. the researching and
writing about a subject-specific term, was perceived as more useful as the final resource in form of a
wiki itself. This ties in with some of the students commenting that they appreciated that “[..] that all
definitions were correct and proof checked [by the tutors]”.
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