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The Use of Wiki-Pages as a Course Reader:
Conclusions after a One-Year Wiki Experiment
Roeland De Breuker
1
, Jan Hol
1
, Gillian Saunders-Smits
1
1
Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Delft University of Technology,
Delft, the Netherlands,
r.debreuker@tudelft.nl, j.m.a.m.hol@tudelft.nl, g.n.saunders@tudelft.nl
Abstract
This paper discusses the results of a one-year experiment of a course on aircraft stress
analysis and design in the second year of the BSc phase at the Faculty of Aerospace
Engineering, Delft University of Technology. The experiment entails an electronic
version of a classical reader in wiki format. The reason for this experiment is based on a
practical need, namely the nature of the course having a large content and a wide
diversity. This makes it difficult to present all the material in a classical reader in a
comprehensive way and to clearly indicate the links between the different parts of the
course content. Therefore a wiki provides an ideal environment to easily link different
subjects to each other. Furthermore since students are allowed to edit the wiki, which is
an innate property of the software, the course contents should become more
comprehensive for the students. It was shown that students are not really enthusiastic
about a wiki format reader, and prefer a written version. The main reason for not editing
a wiki reader is that students find themselves too inexperienced, or simply do not have
the time to edit the content.
Keywords: Online reader, Wiki-format reader, Grassroots project TUDelft
1. INTRODUCTION
According to Wikipedia, a wiki can be defined as “A wiki is a page or collection of Web
pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a
simplified markup language” [1]. The most famous wiki is obviously Wikipedia, however,
the concept of a wiki exists in the shape of numerous applications. The main idea is that
people using a wiki as a knowledge repository also contribute to the contents. If the user
group is large enough, the quality of the contents of the wiki is assured using the self-
regulating mechanism that errors are filtered out and stories refined due to the editing by
multiple people.
The course under consideration in this paper is the course “Aircraft Stress Analysis and
Structural Design”, course code AE2-521N, which is taught in the second year of the
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Bachelor's curriculum at the Delft University of Technology (TUDelft), Faculty of
Aerospace Engineering [2]. This course is traditionally experienced by students as being a
difficult course. The reason for this is twofold. First of all there is a large quantity of course
contents. The course runs for a whole semester, of which the first half two times a week,
and the second half one time a week. The second reason is that a large number of topics is
dealt with. These topics, though seemingly different, are all interconnected, and
understanding the relation between the different sub-parts will contribute to a better
understanding of the course.
This paper explains how an attempt is made to solve the abovementioned issues, and how
this attempt is evaluated by the student. In the framework of the Grassroots project of
TUDelft [3] an initiative was started to find an alternative for the classical reader that exists
for this course already. This is done by converting the reader into a wiki-format. This paper
is built up as follows. First the wiki of the course is explained in more detail. Next, the main
question of this paper is answered to, namely how did the students experience and evaluate
the use of a wiki as a reader. This is done by offering a questionnaire to the students.
Finally, pertinent conclusions are drawn, and recommendations made for future use of
wikis as course readers.
2. SETUP OF WIKI PAGES AS A COURSE READER
The wiki pages are set up using the open software Mediawiki. The full description on how
this was achieved, and which considerations were taken into account can be found in [4]. A
screen-shot of the wiki can be found in figure 1.
The students were given an account at the beginning of the course, which gave them full
authority to edit any contents of the wiki. It was not mentioned explicitly that all
contributions would be checked and, if found to be sufficient, released by the teachers,
although the latter was the objective. The reason for not mentioning was to really give the
impression to the students that the framework was there, but that they had the responsibility
to make sure that the contents are clear, and provided with sufficient examples. This would
make the reader by and from students, and it would be interesting to investigate which
emphases the students would put on particular topics of the course compared to a teacher.
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FIGURE 1. Screen-shot of the AE2-521N wiki
3. STUDENT RESPONSE INVESTIGATION
The experiences of students with the wiki as a course reader are gauged by offering the
students a questionnaire after having taken the written exam of the course. The
questionnaire contained two parts, one part with yes/no-questions, and one part with a
question where students could write down their opinion about one particular topic. The
student batch size was 311, and the questionnaire was completely voluntarily. Out of the
311 students, 278 students handed in the yes/no part of the questionnaire, and 220 the
question requiring a written answer.
The yes/no questions were the following:
1. Did you use the wiki?
2. Did you edit the wiki?
3. Would you prefer a reader instead of a wiki?
The open question was formulated as follows: “Why didn't you edit the wiki ?”. The reason
for asking this latter question is that the teachers of this course discovered during the
teaching period of the course that virtually nobody edited the wiki, though the students
participating in the course all got an account which gave them full authority to edit the wiki.
Also internet statistics indicated considerable activity on the wiki, as can be seen in figure
2.
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FIGURE 2. Web statistics of the wiki
This course runs from September to December each academic year, which can be seen from
the activity overview. Looking at the number of unique visitors, a majority of the students
used the wiki, although the original reader, on which the wiki was based, was available.
The exam for this course is in January, and the resit in April, which explains the activity
around that period.
4. RESULTS
In this paragraph, the results of the questionnaire mentioned in paragraph 3 are discussed.
The results to the yes/no questions are listed in table 1.
TABLE 1. Results of the yes/no questions
Question #
Yes [%]
No [%]
1 67.00%
23.00%
2 98.00%
2.00%
3 81.00%
19.00%
It is clear that students tend to use the wiki. Two thirds of the students used the wiki to
study the material of the course, and to prepare for the exam. Furthermore it is remarkable
that almost nobody edited the wiki, as was already observed by the teachers when looking
at the wiki editing activity during the year. Potentially the most interesting conclusion is
that students simply like to use a reader instead of a wiki. Although in a reader, they have to
look up the information in a less advanced way than when using a wiki, they prefer to have
it hard copy.
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The responses to the open question – why they did not edit the wiki – are grouped into a set
of answers that showed up in the students' answers. To each group, the number of students
answering in that sense is appended. The results can be seen in table 2.
TABLE 2. Students' reasons not to edit the wiki
Answer [%]
I felt that I was not qualified to edit the wiki. 31.00%
I did not like using the wiki. 25.00%
The wiki was fine as it was; there was no need to edit. 22.00%
I had not time to edit the wiki. 15.00%
I do not know how to edit a wiki. 9.00%
I do not trust the wiki since it is edited by multiple people. 1.00%
First of all it is noticeable that the sum of all percentages in table 2 is not equal to 100. The
reason for this is that some students gave multiple reasons for not editing the wiki. The
main reason for not editing the wiki apparently is that students feel that they are not exactly
qualified because of lack of knowledge. Though, as stated in paragraph 2, it was mentioned
explicitly that students should only edit the wiki is certain explanations are not clear for
them, or if they want to add examples to make the explanation more illustrative. The second
reason is very simple that one fourth of the students did not like the wiki, which made it not
attractive to edit it. Almost the same amount of students found that the wiki was just fine
the way it was set up by the teachers, and as such, there was not need to edit the contents.
Then there was the 15% students who did not have the time to do anything about the wiki,
although, if given the time, they would have done it. Remarkably almost 10% of the
students had no clue how to edit the wiki, though the current generation of BSc students
grew up with the internet, of which the wiki concept is an integrated entity for many years
now. Some of them even failed to spot the difference between the well-known Wikipedia,
and a customarily set up wiki like the one of this course. And then there was one percent
who even did not trust the wiki since it was to be edited by fellow students, and as such did
not bother trying to improve the wiki.
5. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
In general it can be concluded that offering the students a wiki instead of a reader to cover
the lecture material did not deliver the results as expected. That is, in the way it was
provided to the students. The main reason for this is that the students did not esteem
themselves qualified enough to edit the wiki. The reason for this can be twofold. Either they
simply lack the confidence to clarify parts of the wiki which were already written down by
the teacher, and add examples they created and solved themselves, or the course contents
were too difficulty for the students to understand up to a level which was sufficient to make
their own addition to the course. Given a pass rate of 60 % for the exam of this course
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shows that the level of understanding of the students was sufficient to rule out the second
possibility. Therefore it seems to be a confidence problem.
Another issue with a wiki-format reader is that students do not seem to like to work with an
electronic format. It might be too challenging to read from a screen instead of from a book,
and there is also the downside that in case of no internet presence, the students have no
access to the course material. Though two thirds of the students used the wiki, most of them
would have preferred a printed version.
An important conclusion from this investigation, which holds for all IT applications in
current university education, is that the modern computer aided tools are not well-known to
all students. There is always a portion of the student population that does not feel
comfortable using particular applications. In the current case, almost 10 % of the students
did not know how to edit a wiki. This obviously does not indicate whether they would have
done it if they would know how to, but it is an important consideration for future use of
applications, in the authors' opinion.
Although the results presented in this paper seem to point at one single conclusion, namely
that using a wiki is not an advantageous way to present course material, there are some
recommendations to be made. In order to convince the students that their contribution to a
wiki is useful, and to make them feel more secure editing the current contents, it might be a
good idea to emphasise the fact that all editions are checked by the teachers for correctness.
Furthermore discussing some of the student's editions in class, and making some examples
how to might improve the student's enthusiasm for editing the wiki. The other issue of the
difference between an online version and a printed version is more difficult to deal with. Of
course, the students can always print the wiki page, but if they have to do it every time the
wiki is edited, this might become a time-consuming and expensive task.
Overall it might not be such a bad idea to combine a printed reader containing all the theory
dealt with in class with an online repository of examples, which the students can edit and
add examples to. There the comments of the teacher how to solve the problems can be
edited by the students as well to make the explanation more clear for the student, and his
fellow students. This might show to be a good compromise between a reader and a wiki,
but this is subject for future investigation.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank the Executive Board of the University and the Grassroots
project management for providing funding for this project as well as all teaching staff
involved in this course, in particular Dr. M.M. Abdalla and Prof. Dr. Z. Gürdal.
References
[1] Wikipedia site, January 2009, http://www.wikipedia.org/
[2] G.N. Saunders -Smits, Zafer Gürdal, Jan Hol, Teaching Innovation for Aircraft
Structural Analysis and Design – Mathematica in an Engineering Education Environment,
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Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference
& Exposition, Portland, Oregon, June 2005.
[3] TUDelft, Grassroots website, March 2009
http://www.icto.tudelft.nl/en/ongoing-projects/grassroots/
[4] J.M.A.M. Hol, R. De Breuker, G.N. Saunders-Smits, M.E.D. van den Bogaard,
GRASSROOTS: How to get lecturers to go digital? - Advanced Use of BlackBoard for
Online Testing in Aircraft Structural Design Courses, SEFI 36th Annual Conference,
Aalborg, Denmark, July 2008.
