Abstract:

In the past few decades, educators witnessed the transformation in the education landscape where knowledge should not be merely transferred to learners but rather socially constructed by learners. As we are entering into the era of Education 4.0, teaching and learning should be designed to enable knowledge creation and innovation to take place. With the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, more lessons are conducting online. The question we should be asking is therefore, how can we encourage online collaborative learning? According to Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, the most advanced level of learning objective which requires the highest order thinking is “creating” knowledge. In the education setting, “idea improvement” is the key mechanism of knowledge creation, and online collaborative tool like Wiki has been identified as an effective platform to support knowledge creation. In this paper, the authors discuss a study conducted with 8 classes of students aged between 17 – 19 from an institute of higher learning in Singapore using Wiki as an online collaborative learning platform to support the creation of knowledge artefacts in two Accounting modules over 5 weeks. The students participated in this study were engaged weekly to share their knowledge on Wiki using slightly different methods. An instrument validated in a pilot run with 7-point Likert scales was used to measure the students’ perception towards using Wiki to support their learning. Qualitative feedback was also collected and it was found that although the students did not perceive the tool to be effective in motivating them in learning or in collaboration, they agreed that the tool helped to enable knowledge sharing and knowledge improvement. It was also found that the group which consistently create a knowledge artefact weekly using one single knowledge board responded more positively in their perception of the collaborative knowledge creation experience using the tool. Finally, the authors discuss the pedagogical concerns of using Wiki to support collaborative learning and recommend strategies to encourage students to develop higher order thinking in their learnings.

Keywords:

Knowledge creation, Wiki, knowledge artefacts, online collaborative tools.