Scalability of assessments of wiki-based learning experiences in higher education

Abstract

In recent years, the focus on higher education learning has shifted from knowledge to skills, with interpersonal skills likely being the most difficult to assess and work with. Wikis ease open collaboration among peers. A number of these skills can be objectively assessed by using wikis in an educational environment: collaborative writing, conflict resolution, group management, leadership, etc. However, when the number of students increases, their interactions usually increase at a higher rate. Under these circumstances, traditional assessment procedures suffer from scalability problems: manually evaluating in detail the information stored in a wiki to retrieve objective metrics becomes a complex and time-consuming task. Thus, automated tools are required to support the assessment of such processes. In this paper we compare seven case studies conducted in Computer Science courses of two Spanish universities: Cádiz and Seville. We comment on their different settings: durations, milestones, contribution sizes, weights in the final grade and, most importantly, their assessment methods. We discuss and compare the different methodologies and tools used to assess the desired skills in the context of each case study.