Group Wiki

Initial situation

This previously well-attended course has seen a spike in student attendance as it has become mandatory. The oral presentation format previously used had to evolve in order to avoid having to devote 2 to 3 sessions to it.

Project implementation

The first two courses are designed to familiarize students with the material. They are quite dense and require a lot of reading. They are evaluated through online quizzes on Moodle following the various assignments that represent the individual grades that students will receive during the semester, the rest of the work being done in groups.

Following this theoretical input, students form groups (about 20 groups) of 2 or 3 to work on a comparison of translation assistance software according to a method learned in class. This work is done directly on a wiki available on Moodle on which the group must share its data and work live.

This type of work requires developing a multi-step analysis on 6 different characteristics. Instead of working on all the characteristics (as was done before), each group is assigned a single characteristic for which it develops all the steps. Several groups are asked to work on the same characteristic (4 groups per characteristic).

First, each group works on its own wiki and then all the groups having worked on the same feature have access to all the wikis created on this feature. This access allows them to vote for the best one. The teacher asks the students not to vote for themselves. The elected wiki will not get a better evaluation, but will be the one included in the final collective report.

In a second step, once all the votes have been cast, the teacher creates the final collaborative report by selecting the parts of the groups that received the most votes. She also writes a conclusion to this report before making it available on Moodle. As the students have read the final report beforehand, the last class is reserved for a group discussion by a show of hands about the feedback on the report and to draw a general conclusion.

The course evaluation, conducted by the teacher, is based on the parts that each group wrote (group grade) and on the results of the quiz (individual grade).

Thoughts and advice

The teacher points out that setting up the wiki with the instructions, common context, and steps prior to the students’ work takes time. It requires a lot of cutting and pasting since each group has its own wiki, each sub-part is presented on a separate page. As the themes change every year, the work has to be repeated every year.

Student feedback

“I enjoyed working in a group and sharing this TP with other people. We were able to divide up some of the tasks and divide up the tests to be done and then share in the wiki. The wiki was very easy to use.” “The group work was very nice, but difficult to coordinate even with the wiki. Perhaps, it would be better if the wiki indicated who wrote what each time.” “I find the surface of the wiki to be very non-ergonomic: you can’t edit the page with more than one person at the same time, the space for writing is small, you don’t realize the layout, adding tables is complicated, and the page system is inconvenient.” “The wiki is very user-friendly and convenient. I enjoyed working in a group because everyone in the group took an active role during the activity.” “It’s handy to have a wiki that everyone can work in remotely, but it’s not really up to snuff (need to go back to the home page between each step, inability to edit it at the same time as a colleague).” “In principle, it’s nice to have an interface where you can collaborate and put things together, but it’s complicated to do a good layout in wiki and I prefer to work the old-fashioned way (i.e., in Word and put everything together afterwards).”