In an interesting experiment in online education, some teachers at the University of Washington required their students to publish their papers on Wikipedia. The assignment was intended to enhance the learning experience of writing a term paper by requiring the students to write their paper for a mass audience, thus allowing them to have the chance to get feedback from a large community of peers.

According to a presentation made by these professors, traditionally, term papers have an audience of one, their objectives are limited, and their impact outside of class is limited. However, this term paper project was designed with the hope that students would benefit from interacting with a wider community of peers and that student researchers could benefit from their exposure to comments from the community at large. The issue of motivation was also considered; if students knew that their work was going to be reviewed by a large audience of people knowledgeable about their topic, then they would be more likely to do real research and attempt to present some new, interesting results.

Wikipedia is an online authoring site on which all material can be edited by anyone who has access to it. According to the site, there are currently 7.5 million articles written in 250 different languages, and two million of the articles are written in English. Everything that is published on Wikipedia is immediately available to a mass, worldwide audience. Wikipedia does have its inherent problems; the reliability of information often comes into question, even though it can be edited by anyone using the site, and articles are published anonymously, which means that there is limited accountability to those authoring the articles.

Two groups of students were given the Wikipedia assignment. In Autumn of 2006, a group of Environmental History and Globalization students were tasked with writing a 1500-word minimum paper that would be 60% of their grade and posting it on Wikipedia, according to Wikipedia guidelines. In Spring of 2007, a group of Conservation and Sustainable Development students were tasked with creating a paper which would be worth 40% of their grade; the length was based upon group size. 34 of the Autum students published papers to Wikipedia, and 14 groups in the Spring class published papers to Wikipedia.

And the results? Some of the Wikipedia feedback was difficult to swallow. Some Wikipedia members deleted student articles, drastically edited content and there was apparently some rude discussion in the Wikipedia community. However, none of the students had difficulty actually publishing their information, and surprisingly, most of the students reported having very positive experience with the assignment. Some students reported feeling a sense of accomplishment that their papers were being read by a wide community of people, and that their research could go on other help other people. All but one of the students in the two courses reported that they felt the assignment was a valuable experience.

Some of the issues to be worked out included helping students translate their paper “voices” from term paper to encyclopedia entry, more time to post entries and more instructor time was needed to help students through the process.

Tags: Learning Technologies, Non-Traditional Students, Online Education