THE USE OF WIKIS AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE TRADITIONAL CLASS WORKS

Currently, the use of collaborative web tools, those that help users to develop contents in group, does not represent any challenge anymore, specially for university students who have been lived the explosion of Facebook, Instagram, Wikipedia, Google Docs, etc. These tools are used daily by our students, not only as final users but as content developers as well.

Here, we propose to change the way our students conceive these tools from two points of view:
i) From a critical sense where collaborative tools can be used to study and to evaluate a material developed by others and
ii) From a creative point of view where students can improve a previously existing content.

To do that, the use of Wikis in classroom to develop a class work about a specific topic of the course is proposed as a didactical innovation experience. Our goal with this activity, in addition to the competencies that this kind of activities provide to our students, is to break up with the current practice of building class works from scratch by searching and copying from numerous web sources. Instead, class works must start from already developed contents by other students’ years before, with the purpose of being reviewed and improved.

Furthermore, the role of the teacher in this experience is crucial, since teachers must guide students in many ways: highlighting problems or mistakes that can exist in previous works, giving alternative contents that may be included in it, providing new ideas related with the content presentation, revising, extending, or reducing the content of the original work, etc.

The development of this proposal can be summarized in two well-differentiated phases: the first one takes place in the first academic year and here, students carry out ordinary class works which are developed in a Wiki. A second phase takes place any year after the first one, and students class works are assigned from the previously developed ones.

Finally, this experience has been performed in the course “Computer Tools for business finances” in Finances and Accountability degree during the last two years. The set of students involved in this proposal has been surveyed about their prior knowledge in Wiki content development before this experience. After the first year, we have got a test bed of class works and after the second, the quality of the final class works and the students’ opinion about the experience have reflected the success of it.