Qualitative assessment of wiki-based learning processes

Abstract

Wikis are common systems to support collaborative learning experiences. When the number of students and the amount of information stored in a wiki system increases, assessing each student’s work is difficult. Wikis keep a registry with differences between consecutive revisions of wiki articles that can be used for learning assessment. This information can be computed over the wiki lifetime in order to obtain quantitative evidence of students' activity. It can also be used to compile students’ assessments from their contributions, under the hypothesis that students’ own assessment support measuring as well as improve their critical abilities. We describe our experience in a course using AssessMediaWiki, an open-source web application that, connected to a MediaWiki installation, supports for hetero, self and peer to peer assessment procedures, whilst keeps track of compiled assessment data. Thus supervisors can obtain reports to help assessing students.