Enhancing Engineering Education with Wikispaces

Abstract

Wikispaces platform was used to support teambased projects and evaluate individual student work. This study was conducted for a Software Engineering course taught to third year Computer Science and Engineering students. Wikispaces Classroom enabled collaboration via sharing and editing wikis within a team and viewing other team wiki pages. Teams were formed and a unique project was assigned to each team at the beginning of the semester. Individual tasks and team work tasks were assigned by the instructor. Wikispaces enabled the instructor to create project wikis for each team. Wikispaces tracked individual members of a team by recording revision history for all project wiki pages that they had updated. This enabled the instructor to grade individual student work. Analysis of the metrics from Wikispaces and Google Analytics and responses to a questionnaire revealed that the students were engaged with the website. Majority of the students revealed that they had gained team work experience. They approved of the grades assigned based on individual tasks. Most of them agreed that the team project wikis were useful. The survey revealed that there was some sort of collaboration among students via viewing wiki pages of others in order to complete their tasks and sharing project wiki pages.