Collaborative writing exercise in an undergraduate course

Actors

• Phumzile is the course convenor for a 3rd-year undergraduate course in Economics of Developing Countries.
• Reza is one of 10 tutors teaching on the course, responsible for a tutor group of 12 students.
• Susan, Bongani and Jonathan are students in Reza's tutor group.

Use Case

Task

Phumzile requires students, working in groups of 3, to choose one of 4 developing countries (Brazil, India, Nigeria and South Africa) and write together an assessment of that country's economic development over the last 3 decades.

Phumzile decides that a wiki would be an appropriate tool to facilitate students collaboratively writing their assessments. Previously this type of exercise had been done with Word documents using track changes, but that required lots of emailing revised documents around, and made it hard for students to work on their group assignments at the same time.

Setup

As the course already has a course site created for it in the Sakai environment, Phumzile creates a template wiki with some instructions about the assignment on the home page, and then creates 12 wikis (one for each tutor group) from the template wiki.

Phumzile would like to discourage students borrowing work from other groups, so the wikis are configured by default so that no students have access to any wiki. Phumzile assigns administration rights for each wiki to the respective tutor for that tutor group.

Reza prepares for the first tutorial session with his tutor group by logging into the Sakai environment, and granting students in his tutor group read and update permissions to the tutor group's wiki.

Reza explains the assignment to the students, who organize themselves into 4 project groups of 4 students. Each project group chooses a different country. All students in the tutor group will use the same wiki for their work, although each project group will be working on a different country in different pages of the wiki.

Collaboration

Susan, Bongani and Jonathan login to the course site, where they see the wiki for their tutor group appear. Over a period of several weeks, they each write a section of the assignment, then collate them together, and do some editing of each others' work to create a coherent composite document.

They find it useful to look at how the other project groups in their tutorial groups are tackling their assignments on other countries, but do not have access to the work of students in other tutorial groups, so cannot compare their own work with any other students working on the same country.

Assessment

On the due date for the assignment to be handed in, Susan creates a PDF of their set of pages from the wiki, and submits the PDF for assessment using the Assignment handin tool.

Reza assesses the assignment, and allocates it a mark. However, because a component of the final mark for each student is based on his or her respective contribution to the project group's effort, Reza also logs into the course environment, and views the wiki contribution history of each student in turn.

The contribution history shows the changes and additions that the student made to the wiki. Reza notices that Susan and Bongani made extensive input and contributions, whereas Jonathan's changes were less frequent and of a less substantive nature, so awards a higher contribution mark to Susan and Bongani than to Jonathan.