learning - Academic Conferences Limited

Andrea Gorra and Ollie Jones
Students appeared to read a number of entries over the course of the module, with our VLE statistics
showing that on average every wiki term had seven visits from other students.
There was mixed feedback regarding the use of wiki glossary entries in the lectures. Some students
commented rather negatively using comments such as “it was embarrassing for those who had written
them and a lot of the time it broke the flow of the lecture” or “I would prefer the tutors more”. While
other students commented “It's good to see work we've done being appreciated” and “It is an
acknowledgement that Student's contributions are valued”.
Overall, we can conclude that the creation of wiki glossary terms had been a successful addition to
the module. Students appeared to engage with the specialist terms of the subject area from an early
stage of the 12 week module and appreciated having access to definitions created by their fellow
students. The final glossary resource based on the collaborative writing platform of a wiki can be seen
as the outcome of ‘collaborative group work’, which also has familiarised the students with this Web
2.0 technology (Shailey, 2009).
However, we feel that this approach will only work if there are sufficient incentives for students to
create these short wiki glossaries. For example, we used the provision of early access to the multimedia
assignment case study as an incentive.
We are planning to use this approach in future deliveries of this Operations Management module as
well as other modules. Comments about the study to the authors are very welcome.
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