Abstract:

Collaborative learning allows students to develop critical thinking, skills in oral and written expression or social skills, among others. Teaching methods that support collaborative learning involve some problems such as the difficulty of tracking the work done by students, which takes place outside the classroom, and the individual assessment of the students, since we cannot evaluate accurately the role played by a student in a collaborative task.

The aim of this work is to assess whether the introduction of Web 2.0 tools can improve the supervising tasks and the feedback to students on collaborative work, and help in the assessment of the individual student work within his group. To do this, we have done an experience in which the students have to work in a Wiki framework.

The experience has been developed with 120 students of degrees in Telematics Engineering, Computer Science, and Information and Documentation, so we have different student profiles to evaluate and compare. The students were divided into groups of 2 - 4 people, and were asked to work within a Wiki. Each Wiki focus on a different project related to the topics of the course. Each group only has access to their Wiki space. Once the work is finished, all students have full access to all the Wikis to share knowledge.

Wikis have been online and available for lecturers allowing continuous monitoring and support. In addition, there has been a record of the student activities in the wiki, in order to estimate the amount of work carried out individually. Situations have been identified where a student has not contributed to the development of the work or its contribution has been poor.

After finishing the course, students have completed a survey to give their opinion about this experience for collaborative work. The survey shows that students appreciate the ability of the Wiki to: i) share the progress of their work, ii) get quick and accurate responses to inquiries from the lecturer, and iii) share knowledge with other students. Students have also made an estimation of the amount of work done by them and their partners. This estimation has been compared with the students’ activity log of the wiki, achieving similar results.

Keywords:

Web 2.0 Tools, Collaborative learning, Assessment.