Presented to the Teaching Criminology, Crime and Criminal Justice Workshop, 13 April 2010 at the University of Sydney.

1. Making group assessment transparent:
what wikis can contribute to collaborative projects
Mike Bogle, Educational Technologist

2. Session Overview
This session is broken into four parts:
3. Examine the learning and teaching issue;
4. Discuss the assessment model;
5. Present the wiki framework;
6. Touch on the outcomes and feedback.
…or basically, the What, Why, How and What Happened.

3. ARTS1091: Media, Society, Politics
Course Details:
•Core foundational course for undergraduates
•12-week course; Semester 2, 2010
•Course convener: Dr. Helen Caple
•500 Students

4. There are many reasons for group work…
James, McInnes, and Devlin (2002, 48) cite three positive reasons:
•Motivating experience, providing students with an opportunity to refine
their understanding of the discipline;
•Generic skills (analytical, cognitive, collaborative) developed through
teamwork are highly valued by employers;
•For lecturers teaching large enrolment undergraduate courses, group
assessments may be more time-efficient.
Source: James, R., C. McInnes, and M. Devlin. 2002. Assessing learning in Australian Universities: Ideas, strategies and
resources for quality in student assessment. Centre for the Study of Higher Education: University of Melbourne.

5. …and yet students frequently hate it. Why?
Issues of Time
•Group commitments can conflict with work & social factors;
Issues of Fairness
•Concerns with how the project is assessed;
•Are freeloaders penalised, or given the same mark as others?
•What about people who do far more?

6. So the learning & teaching challenge became…
…to identify a way of addressing the Issues of Time and Fairness while
preserving the positive reasons for using group work.

7. The Assessment Task
• Students were divided into small groups during their tutorials;
• Research media ownership and regulation in a particular country;
• Collate the research in a country page in the course wiki.

8. The Marking Model
Group mark: Each country page was assessed in terms of its content,
accuracy and presentation, and scholarly research.
Individual mark: Each group member then received a second mark
based on their personal contributions.
Thus, both product and collaborative process were assessed.
…useful idea, but how do you capture the participation?

9. Enter the wiki
• Wiki’s are collaborative websites containing user-generated articles;
• Edit view frequently resembles Microsoft Word;
• Tracks every change to every page for the lifetime of the site;
• Identifies who made the change, when, and what they did;
• Inbuilt version control and content recovery
…wikis document elements that are invisible in offline group work.

10. http://arts1091.unsw.wikispaces.net/

11. Each page features a change history

12. Histories recount all changes to an article

13. They also track who made the changes, where & when

14. Student Feedback
• Ability to work online eased time constraints; provided flexibility;
• Enjoyed seeing other group’s projects develop;
• Page histories inspired greater sense of fairness

15. Technical Issues
• Manual enrollment process delayed access for some students;
• A few instances of overwritten content; resolved using page revert;
• Pasting pre-prepared content from Word led to significant formatting
issues, requiring staff intervention to fix;

16. Questions?