Production and Assessment of Student-Authored Wiki Textbooks

Computer Science (31)

Emerging information technologies are enabling new forms of content delivery. Students are provided with the opportunity of writing a peer-reviewed textbook for their own course. Instead of being merely the consumers of knowledge, students become co-producers, along with the instructor. This is forcing them to learn the material in greater depth, and to reflect upon it more frequently. The natural medium for the creation of such a textbook is a wiki, because it standardizes the format and makes it easy for students to edit parts of a larger work. This project is combining two sets of expertise: wiki textbook creation and software for peer review of student-generated content.

A software system to manage the creation and peer review of a wiki textbook has several automating features. These features include rubric creation by students, double-blind feedback between author and reviewer, and quality-control strategies for student peer reviews. This software system also provides support for flow management to allow different chapters of the text to be written and reviewed at different times during the course of the creation to support this experience.

This project is advancing understanding in a variety of disciplines by engaging students in knowledge generation as well as knowledge acquisition. Students not only learn existing material better, but they uncover and codify new knowledge for their peers. This gives students first-hand experience with the process of inquiry and scientific discovery.

By making it easier to manage the writing of a wiki textbook in a class, it encourages instructors to have their students write wiki textbooks. Finally, the software system that is being developed is adoptable in disciplines other than STEM.