USE OF WIKIS AS COLLABORATIVE TOOLS IN A B-LEARNING COURSE OF PHARMACOLOGY

Wikis represent a powerful tool to create collaborative documents in a website environment and next to other tools, such as blogs or podcasts, which have transformed the web leading to the known as Web 2.0. Wikis are being also employed as educational tools in many fields including medical and health sciences.
Since 2008-2009 academic year, a blended-learning group was created for the subject of ‘Veterinary Pharmacology, Pharmacy and Therapeutics’. It is formed by undergraduate students which are also enrolled in the conventional teaching activities (face-to-face lectures and practical activities) under the tutorship of three senior lecturers. To manage this b-learning course a Virtual Classroom of Pharmacology (VCP) was created using Moodle and following Plan Keller´s recommendations.
The students were invited to participate in different b-learning activities like the creation of original educational materials such as games, lessons outlines or thematic posters related to Pharmacology to be placed in the VCP.
During the last two courses the students have developed a series of lessons outlines to be used as a guide to revise the main concepts and terms of a particular theme. The 49 outlines summarize in an A4-sized sheet the main concepts and terms corresponding to the full syllabus in a “at a glance” format. They were put all together in a review book which was available in the VCP as a PDF file. This was a collaborative work highly appreciated by students as a helpful reference tool to prepare the exams.
This work presents the results obtained from the transformation of the outlines in a wiki format using wiki utilities obtained from our virtual learning platforms (Moodle and Sakai). The students have been responsible to create and to edit one wiki for each lesson outline and to include hyperlinks for the main concepts to additional material located in the VCP and also to create a glossary with those terms. Thus, VCP is now a platform with a web 2.0 philosophy.
During the wiki creation the student order, structure, relation, integrate and assimilate the knowledge about particular aspects of pharmacology. Therefore, once finished these materials are shared with the rest of students and can be employed to revise the lessons contents promoting a deep and collaborative learning. Hence, the generation of these materials reinforces the learning and the work in a team atmosphere.
Results obtained and advantages and disadvantages of wikis as pedagogical tools will be presented and discussed.
This work has been supported by a grant from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (PIMCD175/2010).