Supporting quality assessment of collaborative learning activities with wiki pages

Several collaborative learning scenarios in higher education classes can be supported with wiki systems. However, assessing the quality of students' activities in wiki pages is cumbersome. In order to enhance a wiki system with tools that support different assessment processes of collaborative learning scenarios, a model for the description of those scenarios has been defined. A prototype that implements this model shows how to facilitate those assessment functionalities in a wiki system. A university teacher asks all the students in her course to create an exercise book collaboratively. Each student is supposed to make a contribution in form of one exercise for a chapter within a given time period. At the end of each time period, the students additionally have to provide the solution to each of their contributions. Also during this time, all students have to solve the other exercises provided by their fellow students as their home work. The teacher plans to assess and especially mark the work and activities of each student. In order to manage the collaborative learning activities of the students, she uses a wiki system that is provided by a central e-learning system of the university. She prepares one wiki-article per chapter of the exercise book. During the course the collaboration is well supported through the wiki system. But in order to assess the students' work, the teacher has to click on each wiki article, read each version of the wiki article, take a note of the name of each student per article, and give a mark corresponding to the quality of the version a student created. The use of a wiki system as a tool to support learning processes and to assess learning activities falls within the category of Assessment 2.0 (2). This kind of assessment is characterized by employing Web 2.0 technologies like wiki systems in order to enable students to work collaboratively. Additionally, disadvantages of Assessment 1.0, which requires a high personal cost and is very time consuming, can be overcome. Wiki systems are well known web applications in the Web 2.0. The contents of wiki systems consist of many interlinked wiki articles. These articles are web pages. A wiki web application is easy to use and allows its users to edit, update, and organize contents