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Use of wikis in graduate course work.

Article Excerpt
Graduate education in an online environment frequently means relying on a course management system (CMS) but also calls for additional interactive components. Courses in an online Master's in Family Studies incorporated wikis (Hawaiian word for "quick") to support collaboration among students. Online collaboration can replicate the expected cooperative learning among graduate students in on-campus settings. To accomplish this, wiki technology was utilized for collaborative webpages.

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Graduate education in an online environment frequently means relying on a course management system (CMS) or learning management system (LMS) such as Blackboard. For an online Master's degree program at Texas Woman's University (TWU), Blackboard serves as the primary course delivery system for 11 100% online courses. The user-friendly CMS allows faculty and students to attend to course activity without a steep learning curve for handling the technology. However, the online courses call for additional interactive components either not available in the CMS or in a preferred format not supported by the CMS. To meet these needs, web-based interactive activities can be supported by University technical staff or by faculty using free or low-cost services outside of University resources. In the TWU degree program known as the Online Master's in Family Studies, faculty members have used several interactive components in online courses in Research Methods, Statistics, and Teaching Family Sciences, among others. The tools have also augmented work in oncampus doctoral courses. The primary uses have been collaboration and surveys; collaboration through wikis is addressed in this article.

A wiki is a set of related webpages that can be authored collectively, typically without special log-on or password entry. The authoring occurs in the web browser through the display of simple mark-up language (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki). Most public wikis operate through open-source code derived from the original WikiWikiWeb, known as the Portland Pattern Repository, developed in 1995 by Ward Campbell (see http://c2.com/ppr/index.html). In a course setting, a wiki provides a collaborative workspace that can display documents immediately with a minimal working knowledge of HTML tags. Changes to the documents are made through "live edit" in the browser window on the Internet. By contrast, a collectively authored document in a CMS setting requires saving, uploading, and other transfer of the file among student-authors. The wiki's function cannot be duplicated among students in the course CMS although it can be achieved in slightly different format by instructors and teaching assistants enrolled in a Blackboard course shell.

COLLABORATIVE WEBPAGES

Collaborative learning emerges as both a process and a goal...

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