Collaborative Learning in a Wiki Environment: Experiences from a Software Engineering Course

Thomas, Pete; Minocha, Shailey; King, David; Taylor, Josie; Sclater, Niall and Schencks, Mat (2008). Collaborative Learning in a Wiki Environment: Experiences from a Software Engineering Course. Technical Report 2008/04; Department of Computing, The Open University.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.00016086

Abstract

The post-graduate course, Software Requirements for Business Systems, in the Department of Computing of the Open University (OU) is one of the early adopters of OU's Virtual Learning Environment. The course involves teaching systematic elicitation and documentation of requirements of software systems. On a software development project, team members often work remotely from one another and increasingly use wikis to collaboratively develop the requirements specification. In order to emulate requirements engineering practice, the course has been enhanced to include group collaboration using a wiki. In this paper, we describe the wiki-based collaborative activities and the on-going evaluation of the pedagogical effectiveness of a wiki for collaborative learning.