Abstract:

Collaborative learning is an educational approach aimed to improve both the acquisition of technical skills as well as other transversal capabilities (typically working in heterogeneous teams). It is progressively considered as an essential tool into the academic programs of the new European Higher Education Space (EHES, which is scheduled in the Spanish University system in the next two academic years), since it prepares students to work in complex social environments in a manner that the final achievements are optimized by the group. There are a number of tools to implement collaborative learning. We are interested in those that use computer applications, and specifically, the World Wide Web. In particular, in this work we present an experience at the undergraduate level that uses a wiki, accessible from any web browser, that could be of interest for engineering courses where students must deliver a written essay/report for their final qualification.

The course where we have developed the experience belongs to the Computer Science Engineering program of the Computer Science Engineering School of the University of Málaga (Spain), and it is given within a special adaptation process to the EHES. Its syllabus contains the basics of LTI control systems and data acquisition and is addressed from a remarked practical approach, being composed of a relatively large number of practical exercises in a laboratory. Up to this school year, students achieved their final mark by adding two components: an individually written report where they explain all the practical exercises they have developed (50% weight in the final mark), and an individually oral examination where they must show their knowledge on essential issues of control and data acquisition that appear on those exercises (the other 50%). In the oral part they have their own written reports available and a limited time to answer the teacher questions, which encourages them to do a good job in the former in order to consult their doubts as efficiently as possible.

This academic year we have changed the individually written reports to a collaborative work, through a shared wiki, while we have maintained the oral examination individual (and the shared wiki as an available resource for consults during that oral part). This has produced important changes in the qualification mode, results, and teacher and students work during the term. For teachers, the wiki report involves technical preparation (wiki limitations, additional plug-ins, ...), re-design of the exercises (of their extension and focus), and more importantly, to develop a fair evaluation system (how to measure not only the final report, but the individual effort on it from each student). For students, the wiki has required to learn the tool, but mostly to make decisions on how to share their work and integrate it, that is, to learn how to actually work in a team.

In this paper we show in detail how we have implemented this evaluation system, and demonstrate in which ways and with which constraints it provides improvements in the learning of the students, both by increasing their motivation and their productivity. We also comment the final results of the experience developed during the academic year 2008-2009, measured through different mechanisms.

Keywords:

collaborative learning, qualification assessment, e-learning.