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WikiTextbooks: Designing YourCourse Around a CollaborativeWriting ProjectBrian P. Katz & Elizabeth ThorenPublished online: 18 Jun 2014.

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PRIMUS, 24(7): 574–593, 2014Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1051-1970 print / 1935-4053 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10511970.2013.843625

WikiTextbooks: Designing Your Course Arounda Collaborative Writing Project

Brian P. Katz and Elizabeth Thoren

Abstract: We have used wiki technology to support large-scale, collaborative writingprojects in which the students build reference texts (called WikiTextbooks). The goal ofthis paper is to prepare readers to adapt this idea for their own courses. We give exam-ples of the implementation of WikiTextbooks in a variety of courses, including lectureand discovery-based courses. We discuss the kinds of challenges that WikiTextbooksaddress and focus on critical design decisions. Finally, we conclude with a suggestedtemplate wiki project that is approachable for new users and appropriate for manycourse structures.

Keywords: Course design, wiki, technology, Moodle, textbook, blended courses,collaboration, writing.

1. INTRODUCTION

As instructors, we have used many different kinds of collaborative student writ-ing assignments in our courses. These assignments have had positive effectson student learning, but they introduced new logistical difficulties. Typically,these assignments required that the students work from one master document.This requirement made it hard for the students to collaborate unless every-one was present, and sometimes information would be lost when conflictingdrafts were saved. In addition, some students found LaTex documents onerousto use. As instructors, we typically saw only final drafts, and it was difficultto tease apart the individual student contributions. Finally, we had hoped thatthese assignments would produce useful, living documents, but the studentsrarely returned to them after submission.

Address correspondence to Brian P. Katz, Department of Mathematics andComputer Science, Augustana College, Rock Island, IL 61201, USA. E-mail:briankatz@augustana.edu

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The advent of cloud technologies such as GoogleDocs and Dropboxoffered interesting solutions to some of these logistical difficulties. In partic-ular, wiki technology offers solutions to all of these difficulties and presentsexciting opportunities for massively multi-user, online, asynchronous group-work. For those unfamiliar with the technology, a wiki is a website withmultiple authors and creators. Peterson [9] gives a nice description of the keyfeatures of a wiki, which we summarize. Wikis allow for online and collabora-tive authoring. The mechanics of page creation and authoring are stream-lined,as is mathematical typesetting, like LaTex; it is often possible to see all ver-sions of a page and track the changes between them. Hyperlinking betweenmultiple pages is made easy or automatic.

Wiki technology has emboldened us to design courses around a single col-laborative student writing project that encompasses all course content, engagesall students, and spans the entire term: the students build a textbook. Becausewe ask our students to build this textbook using wiki technology, we call it aWikiTextbook.

This journal has published an article that describes a course with a student-written textbook [1] and another course with a wiki [9]. In this paper, weextend these articles in two ways. First, WikiTextbooks combine the ideasof wikis and student written texts, so our examples give further illustrationsof the ideas therein. Second, our purpose with these examples is different:to focus on course design more explicitly, rather than emphasizing measuredoutcomes from particular courses. We frame the discussion of course designthat uses WikiTextbooks as a response to the design challenges created bythe student learning objectives and existing structural dilemmas in the course.Moreover, we give a general discussion of the design decisions involved inusing a WikiTextbook; we also give a template structure that is broadly appli-cable and flexible. By the end of this paper, you will have ideas about how youcould design a course around a WikiTextbook.

● In Section 2, we begin by giving examples of three classes with design chal-lenges and the WikiTextbooks we built in response; we also discuss theconsequences of the implementations. Our successes and missteps in theseexamples inform the conclusions we make in Section 4. These examplescome from courses that are lecture-based (Subsection 2.1), exploration-based(Subsection 2.2), and inquiry-based (Subsection 2.3).

● In Section 3, we step back from the examples to connect WikiTextbooks tocourse design challenges more generally.

● In Section 4, which is the heart of this paper, we discuss critical designdecisions when implementing WikiTextbooks.

● In Section 5, we offer a starting point that will help you to design a coursearound a wiki project for the first time. We have realized this starting pointas a wiki [10] for our readers.

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This paper emphasizes the decisions that an instructor must make whenincorporating a wiki into a course. These questions are the same for anysize class, though the answers and intended outcomes may differ greatly. Thethree detailed examples of WikiTextbooks below come from small courses; incontrast, Buckland [2] gives an inspiring talk with examples of wiki designin courses with 60–600 students. Moreover, in Section 5, we offer somemodifications to the template structure to manage larger classes.

1.1. Notes on Platform

Our courses all used versions of the online course management system,Moodle, which has built-in wiki capability. (We have also built wikis usingPBWorks [8, 10], which is free for educational purposes.) The wiki in Moodleallows for embedded images and LaTex code with very little technical over-head. Moodle automatically restricts access to the people associated with thecourse by requiring a campus login. The Moodle wiki saves copies of everyversion of every page, including author information and a time-stamp; the wikiwill display differences between versions and is searchable. Section 4 containssome thoughts on familiarizing students with wiki technology.

For some applications, technology other than a wiki may be more appro-priate. In the examples we discuss, the hyperlinking structure unique to a wikiplays a central role. However, if you expect students to edit simultaneouslyand do not need pages organized through links and hierarchical structures,GoogleDocs is great. See [4] for a discussion of the relative merits of webtechnologies.

2. EXAMPLES AND LESSONS

This section contains three examples of course structures includingWikiTextbooks, which vary in terms of the type of course and the central-ity of the wiki in that course. The first example comes from a lecture-basedcourse to which the wiki is added to support study habits. The second examplecomes from an exploration-based course in which the wiki serves as the ref-erence text. The third example comes from an inquiry-based course in whichthe WikiTextbook helps the students reflect on geometry and mathematics as awhole. The third example is the most successful because the wiki is at the verycenter of the coursework.

Each example gives an outline of the wiki implementation, but thesubsections focus on the design dilemmas and concerns that led us to incorpo-rate a wiki into our courses. Each subsection is concluded with lessons learnedabout course design involving wikis.

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2.1. Calculus II, Lecture-based

This subsection describes a Calculus II course taught using a standard lectureand discussion format. We include this example because the course structureis common, so the wiki structure in this section is approachable and adaptablefor many existing courses. Moreover, the work involved aligns closely withefforts to teach our students to read, take notes, and study effectively, whichmany instructors already do. From this example, we learn lessons about shiftingdecision-making authority to the students.

2.1.1. Design

The content goals for this course are determined by the department to includetechniques of integration, applications of integration, and power series. Thecontent of this course can be extremely technically demanding, especially whenthe students are struggling with algebraic and abstract notation. To address thisdilemma, we focus on helping students develop the habit of generalizing andabstracting from examples. Generalizing from examples reduces the amountof material that must be memorized and draws their attention from the algebraback to the concepts. The WikiTextbook was set up to implement this focusby: (I) giving the students opportunities to pare examples down to their mostessential features (abstract); and (II) providing examples from which they cangeneralize.

The WikiTextbook contains three main components: lecture summaries,detailed examples, and questions. One student per lecture built a lecture sum-mary page in the WikiTextbook; the student had a few days to produce a firstdraft of this page, and then would meet individually with the instructor to dis-cuss the draft. These discussions focused on how to identify and select theimportant patterns and how to choose examples that support an understandingof those patterns. The student then had a few days to revise the lecture summarypage in response to this conversation.

Students were regularly responsible for solving individual problemsrelated to class discussion of the lectures. Each student built a page with adetailed solution of their problem and linked it to the corresponding lecturesummary page. In addition to a solution, students were expected to includeexplanations of important steps, so the write-ups resembled examples froma textbook. However, in comparison with traditional textbook examples, thestudents were expected to expand more on why they had chosen to do thosesteps.

Finally, as each exam approached, the students were asked to post ques-tions at the bottom of multiple lecture summary pages about the contenttherein; they were also asked to answer at least one question asked by a peer.

The goal for including the WikiTextbook in the course was to support gen-eralization and to encourage the development of the habits of abstraction and

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generalization, and it appears to have been successful. Unlike previously taughtsections of Calculus II, the students were able to use the commonality betweenthe applications of integration to approach new challenges. These applications(e.g., volumes of revolution, arc length, and total pressure computations) aregenerally too large to hold in working memory, and the written examples in theWikiTextbook provided critical support. Moreover, all of the students used theWikiTextbook extensively during the take-home exams despite having accessto a traditional textbook. Several reported that it was much easier for them toget ideas from the WikiTextbook than the purchased textbook, which indicatesthat the students were trying to extend existing solutions instead of looking foralgorithmic instructions for techniques.

The discussions with the student authors of the lecture summary pageswere the best part of the course. These discussions provided an opportunity forthe student author to abstract from the examples in the lecture to more generalapproaches. The students often commented that the process caused them tolearn how to take notes in a lecture.

2.1.2. Lessons

This WikiTextbook project was a positive experience, but we have learned apair of lessons from this example. First, the students performed more highlyon the quizzes and exam problems related to the content that they added tothe WikiTextbook; so authoring a page appears to have helped the studentabstract/generalize in one particular topic, but that skill may not have trans-ferred fully to other topics. Second, and more important for our discussion ofcourse design, almost every addition to the WikiTextbook required adminis-trative action on the instructor’s part. It was also a struggle to get the contentinto the wiki fast enough for it to be helpful to anyone but the student author.We offer some suggestions for preventing these administrative issues withcourse design choices in Subsections 4.3 and 4.4.

2.2. Vector Calculus, Exploration-based

This subsection describes an honors Vector Calculus course, structured aroundexploration projects that help students discover and define vector calculus con-cepts organically. There was almost no instructor lecturing, no textbook, andthe use of outside resources was prohibited as these activities could underminethe discovery process. Each week the students were given a new project thatconsisted of a sequence of problems focused on a particular topic. Class timewas spent on small-group conversations about these problems, student presen-tations of solutions, and whole-class discussions. We call this course structureexploration-based.

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2.2.1. Design

Previous iterations of this exploration-based structure led to the followingdesign challenges that we hoped to address with a WikiTextbook project. First,without a textbook or access to outside sources, the students had trouble keep-ing track of the large body of material generated in class. Second, there wasnot enough cause for students to synthesize the knowledge they gained, reflecton the goals of individual projects, or connect ideas across projects.

The basic set up of the project was simple - each week, two to three studentauthors wrote a chapter in the WikiTextbook that corresponded to that week’sexploration project. The instructor assigned the student authors for each chap-ter, but these authors were responsible for determining what content to includeas well as how to divide the writing duties. One week after the official due date,the chapter was open for editing by any student in the class for extra credit.

While the WikiTextbook project was not a failure, it did not accomplishthe design goals. First, a few students felt the WikiTextbook was a very valu-able reference text, but data from the students indicate that the majority ofthe class did not use it much. In general, students felt that while it was nice tohave an easy-to-navigate reference tailored to the course, they found the unevenquality and occasional omissions frustrating. Second, roughly one-third of thestudents took great care in writing expository material for their peers, and inthese cases the wiki provided an opportunity to reflect on a particular con-cept. However, the majority of entries did not indicate much reflection at all.The class did not harness the power of the wiki format to synthesize and con-nect the material as intended. Most students wrote a cursory chapter summaryand only hyperlinked to other sections after being prodded by the instructorfeedback.

2.2.2. Lessons

We believe that the structure of this course did not succeed because the stu-dents in this course were left with two fundamental questions that underminedthe value of the WikiTextbook: “why do this work” and “who is responsiblefor it”; these two questions lead to our lessons learned. First, from the stu-dents’ perspectives, the writing for their homework made the writing for thewiki redundant, which undermined their reasons to do or learn anything addi-tional from building the wiki. Second, more importantly, the course structureskept the students from committing fully to the wiki project. Because only twoto three students were responsible for creating each new chapter, it was natu-ral for them to approach this work as an individual assignment in which theydid little synthesizing with other content. Because students authored a chapterduring only one week of the term, it was natural for them to think about theirresponsibility to the wiki project as living in that single week. Because a smallgroup of students were seen as “owning” each chapter, other students were

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reluctant to make substantial edits to existing writing. Moreover, students wereexpected to write a peer-review before editing, which provided another hurdleto editing and further undermined their ability to take ownership of the projectas a whole. As a result, the document was uneven in quality, which reduced itsusefulness as a resource. The core lesson learned is that each student needs tofeel responsible for the creation and revision of every part of the WikiTextbookproject. We talk more about the questions of “why” and “who” in Section 4.

2.3. Modern Geometry, Inquiry-based

This subsection will describe a Modern Geometry course that was structuredin the tradition of the “modified Moore method.” There was no textbook forthe course; in fact, the students were prohibited from using external resourcessuch as books and the internet. In place of a textbook, the course was struc-tured around a sequence of theorem statements and problems from the “packet”written by David Clark [3]. In preparation for class each day, the studentswould prepare proofs or solutions for the next approximately six items fromthe packet. The majority of class time was spent presenting, discussing, andpolishing these proofs. We call this course structure inquiry-based.

2.3.1. Design

For many of our students, Geometry is the last proof-based course, and many ofthese students are future teachers. This position leads to the following goals ordesign challenges. First, the students should add coherence, connectivity, andperspective to their existing Geometry content knowledge. Second, the stu-dents should raise the quality and precision of their communication. Third,the students should internalize the axiomatic method of mathematics and theaccompanying values and beliefs about mathematics and mathematical truth.

The structure of the WikiTextbook tasks described below puts the wiki atthe very center of this course, encouraging the students to go “all-in.” In short,the students are writing a textbook collaboratively; the final collective grade onthe WikiTextbook determined the majority of each student’s individual finalgrade. The instructor serves as the Publishing Editor for this manuscript andrepresents an external standard for quality, though the students retain the roleof Authors throughout.

Most of the class time was spent with the students presenting the the-orems that they had proved in preparation for class. Before the next classmeeting, the students were expected to publish something substantive fromclass to the WikiTextbook. In addition to the thrice-weekly publishings of newcontent, the students were expected to contribute weekly to the quality of theWikiTextbook through some editorial work. Eventually, this editorial work alsoincluded the task of writing summaries at the section and chapter level andsigning off on the quality of portions of the document. The instructor regularly

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evaluated individual contributions and the quality of the over-all progress ofthe document.

In addition to the work on the WikiTextbook, the course was structuredto leverage the wiki for reflection on the nature and processes of mathematics.First, the students were able to quickly build an Appendix to the WikiTextbookthat contrasted the results from Euclidean and Hyperbolic Geometries. Second,the students used the site map for the WikiTextbook to build a visual represen-tation for the connections between our theorems, which in turn allowed us toreflect on the nature of truth in an axiomatic system. Third, the students rereadexamples of their own writing, including multiple versions of the same page.They reflected on and documented how much and in what ways they had devel-oped as writers. Finally, prepared by the work with the WikiTextbook, we wereable to learn about Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems ([6]) and discuss theirimplications for the axiomatic method of mathematics.

The WikiTextbook structure described above helped to accomplish thecourse goals and to respond to the design challenges. First, the studentsreported that the act of hyperlinking the items in the WikiTextbook addeddramatically to the coherence and connectivity of their Euclidean Geometrycontent knowledge. They reported that the revision, summary, and Appendixwork were valuable for adding perspective to their understanding of EuclideanGeometry. Second, the quality of the student writing rose dramatically duringthe term. The students reported that having the end-goal of a textbook thatthey had created was critical for maintaining the motivation to keep revisingtheir work. Third, the students developed a more nuanced understanding of thenature of mathematical truth and internalized the axiomatic method. They alsoseem to have come to accept that human choices play a role in the developmentof mathematics, particularly in the form of axioms. The students reported thatthe revision work and the discussions of the Incompleteness Theorems werecritical for these changes.

2.3.2. Conclusions

Unlike the two previous examples, this WikiTextbook project was an unquali-fied success; the difference here is that the students went “all-in” by retainingauthority and responsibility to build the wiki and by constantly directing theirenergy towards that work. The students reported that they are proud of theWikiTextbook. The pre-service teachers reported that they expect to use theWikiTextbook in their future careers; one student even mentioned discussingit at a job interview with an impressed interviewer. Additionally, the hiddengoal in our course design approach is to get students to engage deeply withthe discipline. In regular surveys, these students reported that they spent agreater proportion of their time in this course doing high-level tasks (analyz-ing, evaluating, and creating) than in their other courses. They connected theseexperiences with the WikiTextbook by pointing to the work of summarizing

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proofs, determining for themselves if a page was complete, and building a bookcollaboratively, respectively.

Lastly, we have learned one more lesson about incorporating aWikiTextbook in our courses: leave time at the end of the term for the studentsto revise and connect the wiki while reflecting on its content and development.Leaving this time allowed us to leverage the wiki to maximize its effect on thecourse objectives.

3. WHY WIKITEXTBOOKS?

Other authors have written about the benefits of students building a textbookand of using online collaborative environments [1, 5, 9]. We would like to addto this conversation by carefully articulating how the student learning objec-tives for our courses and other dilemmas created by existing course structuresconnect to our design decisions. We believe that asking students to build aWikiTextbook provides an opportunity to accomplish many of these objectivesand to address many of these dilemmas. We will organize the student learningobjectives as knowledge, skills, and dispositions. These objectives are generaland present in all of our courses.

Knowledge: Regardless of the content goals for a course, students shoulddevelop a deep understanding of the course topics. The students’ understandingof the course topics should be connected and interrelated.

Contributing to a WikiTextbook provides an opportunity for deep engage-ment with the content, and hyperlinking encourages a less linear and moreinterconnected understanding.

Skills: Students should communicate their ideas clearly, thoroughly, effec-tively, and appropriately. Towards this end, students should revise theirwritten communication. Students should collaborate effectively and appro-priately. Students should use the resources available to them effectively andappropriately; for example, students should evaluate ideas critically.

Building a WikiTextbook provides many opportunities for students towrite and revise; moreover, they must write carefully because they are writingfor their peers and future selves, not an expert. Wikis facilitate collabora-tion; large tasks such as building a WikiTextbook can motivate collaboration.Finally, because a WikiTextbook is student-authored, it encourages readers touse it in conscious and critical ways.

Dispositions: Students should feel that they have taken ownership of the coursematerial and that they are the experts and authorities for portions of the content.The students should come to believe that mathematics is a human endeavor andis changing through time.

WikiTextbooks make the construction of knowledge visible and communalyet still personal.

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In addition to the knowledge, skills, and dispositions above, we believethat WikiTextbook projects can address other common structural dilemmasand design challenges. First, because students are naturally encouraged in allcourses to focus on the newest and hardest ideas, we must be very carefuland explicit with our course design decisions to give them time to processdiscussion from class, reflect on their learning, and synthesize the course mate-rial. The WikiTextbook designs described above explicitly ask the students tokeep thinking about class after it is over. Second, communication is essentialto learning and collaboration. It may be better if giving or receiving feedbackdid not require an in-person meeting because this puts an upper limit on thespeed of that communication. Moreover, when appropriate, student work andthe feedback on it should be available to other students. This feedback cantransform the standard teacher–student dialogue into a teacher–student–studentconversation. Wiki technology offers new and exciting ways for information toflow outside of the classroom.

3.1. WikiTextbooks and Discovery-Based Learning

The authors teach a variety of exploration-based and inquiry-based courses.We group these types of courses together and call them discovery-basedcourses because the students generally discover the main results instead ofhaving those results explained to them through lecture. Discovery-based coursedesign has some unique challenges, and we think WikiTextbooks are especiallyuseful for addressing these challenges.

First, speaking and group work are the primary focus in a discovery-basedclassroom. WikiTextbooks balance this focus with emphasis on asynchronouswriting. This balance is particularly appealing to shy students who mayunder-perform in public. Second, there is no reference text in a discovery-based course because it can undermine the students’ motivation for invention.A WikiTextbook collects the discoveries and serves as a reference. Third, feed-back must be extremely timely in a discovery-based course because each step isa step into the unknown for the student. Wikis allow the instructor timely accessto the current draft of a student’s work at any time through the internet whenneeded. Fourth, holes in understanding sometimes go unfilled in discovery-based courses because the students are always working on new discoveries.Building a WikiTextbook asks students to organize and solidify their discover-ies. This can make holes transparent, but it is also an important tool for findingnew directions for inquiry and exploration.

4. WIKI-COURSE DESIGN

In the previous section, we described the kinds of design challenges that causeus to include WikiTextbooks in our courses. Simply adding a wiki to a course

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is insufficient for the kinds of benefits that we desire; instead we must designthe course to encourage students to go “all-in” by fully committing to theproject. The benefits come from the work done by the students, which givesthem a significant amount of responsibility for their learning. Our experiencehas taught us that the students will need answers to fundamental questionsabout the WikiTextbook (who, what, when, where, why, and how) and thatthese answers should be integrated into the design of the course. In this sectionwe explain these student questions and share ways to provide them answers,with references to our own missteps and successes in the examples fromSection 2.

4.1. Why?

The students need to have a reason for using the wiki and contributing highquality content to the wiki. If the product is not high quality, then the studentswill see that using and contributing to the WikiTextbook is not valuable, fur-ther reducing their motivation (see Subsection 2.2). Moreover, students whoare motivated to engage with the WikiTextbook are significantly less likely touse resources inappropriately or to cheat. You can create two main types ofmotivation for students to engage with a WikiTextbook; it can be the uniquesolution to an individual need, and it can be part of a general communal need.

For a few students, the love of the material or the enjoyment of creat-ing will be all the reason needed. For the rest, there are many ways to set upindividual needs and frame a WikiTextbook as the unique solution to thoseneeds. The most obvious way is to make individual contributions part of thestudent’s grade (the subtle consequences of this approach are discussed below).You could also allow the students access to the WikiTextbook during theirexams, or you could allow them to quote only those results that are part ofthe WikiTextbook. The WikiTextbook can be sold as a personalized referencethat can be exported and kept (see Subsection 2.3).

Stepping back even further from grades, you can convince the studentsthat working on the wiki is valuable by explicitly connecting that work to thelearning objectives. It is critical for this argument that the work on the wikibe distinct from the other work being done by the students. For example, inSubsection 2.2 we mention how overlapping tasks undermined the value ofthe wiki in Vector Calculus. Similarly, the WikiTextbook could be the onlyresource that will make the structure and organization of the course content vis-ible to the students. For example, the wiki in Calculus II in Subsection 2.1 wasdesigned to help the students see the commonalities among the applications ofintegration.

In addition to the students’ individual needs, general communal needs playa vital role in the success of a WikiTextbook. The feeling that the contribu-tors to a wiki are “in it together” and hence are responsible for carrying their

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weight and taking initiative is sometimes called “WikiNature.” The simplestway to generate WikiNature is to make each student responsible for the prod-uct as a whole and make sure it is too large for an individual student to buildalone. We learned from the Vector Calculus wiki in Subsection 2.2 that makingeach student responsible for an isolated section of the final product squashesWikiNature. It is also important to bring the WikiTextbook into the classroom:refer to it regularly, display it at critical moments, and use it to answer ques-tions when possible. When a student has authored a page, they have becomeyour local expert; ask them to serve as that expert in the classroom. Do yourbest to make sure there is exceptional work done early in the term, and praisethat work publicly.

Whatever motivations you choose to build into your course design, youwill need to keep emphasizing them for the students regularly. Talk with stu-dents about the causes of their learning and about the understandings that youdo not think would have been possible without it, and do something with thewiki that could not have been done otherwise (see Subsection 2.3); use the tech-nology to share information differently, to connect it through hyperlinking, andtrack its changes through versioning.

4.2. How?

Once the students believe that they should build the WikiTextbook, they willwant to know how they will accomplish such an enormous task. Before thestudents can understand how they will build a WikiTextbook, they need to beable to imagine the final product. We suggest that you build the skeleton of thewiki before the term begins and ask the students to explore it on the first day.The skeleton should include enough pages to convey the large-scale structureof the wiki and a MainPage that describes the kinds of information that will beincluded in it. We describe a concrete example of a skeleton below in Section5, or you can see this skeleton directly [10].

You will need to communicate to the students that they will be both gener-ating content for the WikiTextbook and revising that content. The easiest wayto accomplish this is to make each type of work an explicit assignment, as wasdone in the Geometry wiki in Subsection 2.3. The students will probably beintimidated by the prospect of generating the content for the WikiTextbook,and they will be particularly intimidated if they have to write about contentthat they do not yet understand. We recommend that you give assignmentsthat ask the students to process the discussion from class, and these assign-ments should produce the content of the WikiTextbook. In Modern Geometry(Subsection 2.3), we further reduced their stress levels by audio-capturing theclass discussions with a LiveScribe pen [7].

To clarify the process of revision for the students, you should giveexamples of changes that establish the difference between surface edits and

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substantive revisions such as connecting disparate pieces into a whole and iden-tifying and filling gaps in the document. We also recommend that you modelthese kinds of work explicitly in class, especially responding to feedback onthe existing content. It can be helpful to produce a “Code of Conduct” for thestudents that establishes appropriate collaborative behaviors, including what todo with feedback, how to edit their peers’ work, and how to decide collectivelywhen work is finished.

4.3. What/When?

In the previous subsections, we have discussed ways to help the studentsunderstand why they are building a WikiTextbook and how that task will beaccomplished. The next natural questions for them to ask are exactly whatthey should be doing and when they should do it. In short, a successfulWikiTextbook requires establishing productive and appropriate work habits.

Doing a small amount of work on the WikiTextbook should be a regu-lar part of the student’s life. At a minimum, we recommend that the studentscontribute something (new content, revisions, feedback) to the WikiTextbookevery week, though every 1–2 days is best. It is important that, for the majorityof the term, this work involves both generating new content and revising exist-ing content, although it can be good to leave some time at the end for the classto focus on larger-scale revisions and to leverage the wiki for your learningobjectives (see Subsection 2.3).

It is also important that certain work behaviors become habits. Encouragestudents to draft in the wiki so that the final step before submission is not justtyping, which can feel like busy-work. It is also important that the students’ ini-tial drafts be expected to include certain structures automatically. Pages shouldbe named systematically and consistently. If the pages are organized into fold-ers, correct placement should be part of the creation habit. The appropriateterms should be hyperlinked in the first draft, and any other navigation shouldbe built when the page is created. We suggest that you use your pre-built skele-ton for the WikiTextbook to establish and communicate these procedures andthat you monitor and direct the students to correct any errors early in the term.It is possible that the students will want to structure the wiki differently thanyou imagined, which is precisely the kind of creative work that we dream of,so you should forward these ideas to the class and praise the initiative.

The most powerful tools for establishing and shaping these work habitsare the assessment, feedback, and grading structures in the course. It turns outthat the approach students take to WikiTextbooks is very sensitive to the grad-ing structures in place, probably because of the scale and novelty of the projectand the expected level of responsibility. There are two, very different ways toanswer the grading question for WikiTextbooks because grading is a double-edged sword. On one hand, a grading structure that gives credit for work gives

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extrinsic motivation for that kind of work; on the other, such a structure canundermine WikiNature. The right mix of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation willdepend on your students and your relationship with them. Moreover, the deci-sions you make about grading depend subtly on how you have answered thequestion of why the students are building a WikiTextbook.

However you set up grades, we recommend that working on theWikiTextbook should be a regular, standing expectation for the students. Thetiming of the assignments should be rhythmic (either in relation to the weeklyschedule or organized around the class meetings), and the responsibility toremember these deadlines should be with the students. Regular, systematicwork can become “just what you do for this course” and move away from“working for a deadline.” See Section 5 for an example.

The grading structure should reinforce the student’s understanding of thevalue of working on the WikiTextbook and should reinforce the habits neededfor creating it. In any setting, we suggest giving a portion of the students’grades to the over-all quality of the WikiTextbook. If possible, make it clearthat top marks on the over-all grade will require the students to show moreinitiative than just building the required portions of the WikiTextbook. Do notgrade the volume of work through the number of changes; grade the qualityof the work. Consider using non-numeric scales so that you can communicatequality of work without the students thinking about it as accumulating points.

4.4. Who/Where?

The variety and volume of work involved in building a WikiTextbook couldeasily become overwhelming (see Subsection 2.1). In addition, the point of thewiki is to allow the students to take the lead, so you need to provide mecha-nisms for answering the questions of who and where that do not involve yourattention or authority. The key is to give the students the power to manage thework themselves.

Our main recommendation is to facilitate the students in self-organizing.Consider occasionally giving the students 5 minutes of class time to discussadministrative issues while everyone is present. Give the students space inthe wiki to make “To Do” lists so they can “claim” content and communi-cate with each other about which items they are contributing or revising. Buildthese spaces so the students can discuss potential decisions, and empower thestudents to take these actions without any prior approval or setup from you.It should be the students’ responsibility to tell you what they have contributedand what they want you to grade, and these pages can serve that purpose aswell. Simply building spaces for self-organization is not enough to guaranteecollaboration, but teaching the skills and habits of collaboration are outsidethe scope of this paper. However, the wiki helps you see the individual con-tributions, which allows you to give them feedback on their collaboration.

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Moreover, the wiki can lower the hurdles for responding to feedback, andresponding to feedback can become a regular part of the students’ work.

4.5. Getting Started

In this section, we have given advice on ways to design your course so thatit provides robust answers to the questions that the students will have as theywork on the WikiTextbook, allowing them to go “all-in” with the project. Thelast crucial consideration is the very beginning of the WikiTextbook, whichinvolves helping the students get the lay of the land and teaching them wikitechnology.

Earlier, we suggested that the students be asked to explore your pre-built skeleton for the WikiTextbook on the first day of class. However, simplyexploring the skeleton of the wiki will not be sufficient for the students to learnthe technology. We suggest that you demonstrate building and editing a pageon the first day of class. We also suggest that you build several “tutorial” pagesinside the wiki. These tutorials should include information on creating or edit-ing a page, inserting images, and including mathematical notation, but for thestudents to start becoming comfortable with the technology, they need to builda page. In our experience, the students will be too stressed if their first pagealso requires them to worry about the new course content. We suggest thatyou have each student build a BioPage that includes; (i) some autobiographicalinformation; (ii) an image of the student; (iii) some mathematical notation; and(iv) some reflection on their learning goals for your course. On top of teach-ing the technology and giving you access to the students’ personal goals, thisassignment establishes the public and student-owned nature of the project.

5. YOUR FIRST WIKI: A WIKIGLOSSARY

Our main objective in writing this article is to help readers successfully designa course around a large-scale wiki project. To that end we have generated anapproachable starter-wiki design that can fit into many different course struc-tures and a wide range of class sizes; it can easily be tailored to support thelearning objectives of the course and perhaps to resolve structural dilemmas.We built a skeleton of the wiki for this project [10], which can serve as a startingpoint for your wiki and will illuminate the discussion below.

In trying to provide a more approachable and broadly applicable wikistructure, we focus on the foundations of mathematics: definitions. We pro-pose having the students build an annotated glossary as a wiki, which we calla WikiGlossary. We want to expand the notion of a glossary to include a vari-ety of examples and both rigorous and intuitive, student-generated definitions.This idea is similar to a project sketched by Peterson [9]. Here, we go further

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by discussing details of the design and integration into your course. The pre-vious section was structured around the questions a student would ask whilebuilding a WikiTextbook. An instructor would ask these same questions froma different perspective, so we give responses in a different order.

5.1. What/When?

No matter what math class you are teaching, your students will be exposed tonew terms and concepts every day. In order to build a WikiGlossary, we proposethat you have your students add these items to the wiki. Each item should haveits own entry page in the wiki that includes a precise definition (if appropriate),an informal definition that represents a student’s understanding of the item, andexamples of the item. Contributing to the WikiGlossary should be a standingassignment; everyone should be responsible for creating, improving, or peer-reviewing an entry after every class. The entries can contain multiple informaldefinitions, formal definitions from several sources, and many kinds of exam-ples. In addition, the WikiGlossary can contain entries for relevant terms fromprerequisite courses. These two types of flexibility allow the instructor to adaptthe WikiGlossary for larger classes. The standing assignment could be sloweddown to a contribution every week, but the work will probably come in spurtsand the content will lag farther behind the course, reducing the usefulness ofthe WikiGlossary.

The schedule of your evaluations of the wiki will determine the paceof students’ contributions, so you (or a TA) will need to look at these con-tributions on the same schedule as the assignments. Here is one idea for amanageable plan for individual assessment. Each contribution receives a markin {0 = none, − = weak,

√ = satisfactory, + = impressive}, and the stu-dent’s individual wiki contribution grade is determined by the trajectory ofthese marks over the term. Written feedback can be minimal and reservedfor serious misconceptions. In addition to these regular assignments, the stu-dents could produce a portfolio of a small selection of their best contributions.Grading the trajectory emphasizes consistent contributions, and grading theportfolio emphasizes high quality contributions. The students should also havea communal wiki grade determined by the over-all quality of the WikiGlossary.You should provide a few sentences each week about the over-all quality, andyou might give an estimate for this over-all evaluations to clarify your thoughtson its progress.

5.2. Who/Where?

In the previous section, we discussed what the students should contribute andwhen those contributions should happen. Here we discuss how the studentsknow who is responsible for the content and where it goes.

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First, the students should be responsible for collecting terms and conceptsfrom class to add to the WikiGlossary; you should not have to produce an offi-cial list of new items before the students can work. Early in the term, considergiving them 5 minutes at the end of class to generate a list together. Thereshould be a “To Do” page in the wiki, moderated by the students, that containsa list of items that need to be added to the WikiGlossary.

Second, the students should be responsible for self-organizing and dividingup the work. The “To Do” page can also serve this purpose. Students can claima piece of work by putting their names next to the items they wish to workon. This page can also include student discussion of needed revisions, not justneeded entries.

Finally, the students should be responsible for communicating their con-tributions to you. For each assignment, create a page in the wiki where thestudents can list the work they did. Each student should provide a brief descrip-tion of his/her contribution (for example, “added new informal definition” or“revised the examples”) and give a link to the page containing that work. Thispage makes it much easier for you to evaluate the contributions because youwill not have to do any searching.

5.3. How?

You, as the instructor, will need to communicate to the students how they aregoing to build a valuable WikiGlossary. We claimed above that the studentswill need to be able to imagine the final WikiGlossary in order to understandwhat they will need to do to build it. We suggest that you build a skeleton of theWikiGlossary that contains the following components and ask the students toexplore this skeleton on the first day. We have provided a sample skeleton [10],and we encourage you to copy from it liberally.

● A MainPage containing a Code of Conduct (i.e., a description ofWikiNature) and a link to each of the following pages.

● A main page for the WikiGlossary, that will contain the alphabetized listof entries. This page should include instructions for adding and formattingnew entries (and for naming those pages). There should also be links to ahandful of interrelated sample entries that you have built, which model thequality of work expected as well as the naming and hyperlinking protocols.The term “function” seems particularly fertile and adaptable for modelingthese standards.

● The ToDo page, where students list the items that need to be added andrevised and where students can claim this work.

● The first few Contributions pages for the standing assignment, where thestudents give you links to the work they have done. This page should includea reminder to link to that work and to describe it.

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● A WikiHelp page that contains information on the mechanics of addingto and editing your wiki such as any special instructions for typesetting,equation editing, and image adding.

● A designated space for the students to add the BioPages they create. Youshould list the content you expect students to add to their BioPages here andadd your own BioPage as an example.

In addition to exploring this skeleton, the students should build theirBioPages and add at least one new glossary entry each as soon as possible.If you can provide a list of terms from prerequisite courses, the students canpractice building entries without having to wait for new content.

In the first week, the students will probably focus on adding newentries with minimal informal definitions or examples; but the value of theWikiGlossary comes from accrued wisdom, which lives in the informal defini-tions and examples. After the first week, we suggest that you help the studentsunderstand this deeper type of contribution by modeling such a contribution inclass and valuing these contributions in the grading. It will help to articulateexamples of deeper contributions, including; (i) adding new intuitive defini-tions, i.e., intuitive definitions from multiple students in one entry; (ii) addingexamples that show new facets of the term/concept; (iii) revising and expand-ing intuitive definitions to include new information from class; (iv) addingcommentary on what to keep in mind when working with a particular con-cept; (v) hyperlinking entries and adding some explanation of these links; and(vi) reorganizing an existing entry so the exposition is clearer or more helpful.Post your articulation at the top of the WikiGlossary main page.

5.4. Why?

The experience of building a WikiGlossary will be quite different for stu-dents at different levels, and the utility of the product will depend heavilyon the rest of your course. Although the WikiGlossary will have built-inutility for students as a study aid, you should find additional motivation foryour students to do this work that are in keeping with your own learningobjectives.

We have three general suggestions for helping the students see the utilityof their WikiGlossary. As above, you can make the WikiGlossary availableto them during exams. Also consider creating exam questions that require thesame processing skills by asking the student to create all or part of an entry fora new term. Finally, you can export (or print) the final draft as documentationof learning or a reference in the future.

We believe that a variation of a WikiTextbook project can enhance yournext class, but we acknowledge that the endeavor takes some courage. We hope

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that the WikiGlossary example has given you the courage to try, and we hopethat this paper has helped you see how you can make this idea your own.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We would like to thank our lovely students for their time, hard work, patience,and feedback.

REFERENCES

1. Boelkins, M. 2005. When students write the text. PRIMUS: Problems,Resources, and Issues in Mathematics Undergraduate Studies. 15(2):97–108.

2. Buckland, R. 2009. Wikis – collaborative web spaces workshop (talk in“Foundations of University Learning and Teaching” programme at UNSW).http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1-8OOrBi0o. Accessed 26 July 2012.

3. Clark, D. 2012. Euclidean Geometry: A Guided Inquiry Approach. MSRIMathematical Circles Library, Volume 9.

4. EdTechLife. http://blogswikisdocs.wikispaces.com/http://blogswikisdocs.wikispaces.com/. Accessed 27 May 2013.

5. Ferris, S. and H. Wilder. 2006. Uses and potential of wikis in the classroom.Innovate: Journal of Online Education. 2(5). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=258. Accessed 18 July 2012.

6. Goldstein, R. 2005. Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel.New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

7. LiveScribe Smartpen. http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/. Accessed 20 July2012.

8. PBWorks. Online team collaboration. http://pbworks.com/. Accessed5 August 2012.

9. Peterson, E. 2009. Using a wiki to enhance cooperative learning in a realanalysis course. PRIMUS: Problems, Resources, and Issues in MathematicsUndergraduate Studies. 19(1): 18–28.

10.WikiGlossaryStarter. http://wikiglossarystarter.pbworks.com. Accessed6 August 2012.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

Brian P. Katz is an Assistant Professor at Augustana College, in Rock Island,Illinois. He received his undergraduate degree from Williams College and hisPh.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, where he learned to use inquiry-based course design. He has designed many classes around wiki projects and

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was invited to present on the topic at the 2012 MAA PREP IBL Workshop. Heis always looking for ways to build courses that help students engage deeplywith mathematical questions through authentic and personal inquiry.

Elizabeth Thoren is an Instructor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, where she metBrian and was also introduced to inquiry-based learning. She has used wikis inprevious courses and has presented on the topic at several conferences. She iscurrently developing materials for explorations-based courses as well as waysto incorporate active learning into very large classes.

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