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Collaborative Learning in a WikiEnvironment: Experiences from asoftware engineering courseShailey Minocha a & Peter G. Thomas aa Centre for Research in Computing, Department of Computing ,The Open University , Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UKPublished online: 07 Dec 2007.

To cite this article: Shailey Minocha & Peter G. Thomas (2007) Collaborative Learning in a WikiEnvironment: Experiences from a software engineering course , New Review of Hypermedia andMultimedia, 13:2, 187-209, DOI: 10.1080/13614560701712667

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Collaborative Learning in a WikiEnvironment: Experiences from a

software engineering course

SHAILEY MINOCHA* and PETER G. THOMASCentre for Research in Computing, Department of Computing, The Open University, Milton

Keynes MK7 6AA, UK

The post-graduate course, Software Requirements for Business Systems, in theDepartment of Computing of the Open University involves teaching systematicelicitation and documentation of requirements for software systems. On a softwaredevelopment project, team members often work remotely from one another andincreasingly use wikis to collaboratively develop the requirements specification. Inorder to emulate requirements engineering practice, the course has been enhanced toinclude group collaboration using a wiki. In this paper, we describe the wiki-basedcollaborative activities and the evaluation of the pedagogical effectiveness of a wiki forcollaborative learning. Our evaluations have confirmed that the strength of a wiki, as acollaborative authoring tool, can facilitate the learning of course concepts and students’appreciation of the distributed nature of the RE process. However, there is a need tosupport the discussion aspects of collaborative activities with more appropriate tools. Wehave also found that there are certain usability aspects of wikis that can mar a positivestudent experience. This paper will be of interest to academics aspiring to employ wikison their courses and to practitioners who wish to realize the potential of wikis infacilitating information sharing, knowledge management, and in fostering collaborationwithin and between organizations.

1. Introduction

As interest in Web 2.0 has picked up in recent years, social software tools suchas blogs (Weblogs), wikis, podcasts, and photo- or bookmark-sharing systemshave become popular. Sites such as YouTube, Myspace, and Facebook arepart of a growing trend towards creating content and sharing informationand ideas via online communities and social networks. Blogs are transformingthe way organizations are communicating not only with their customers butwith their partners, vendors, employees, investors, and the media. Theconversational capabilities of blogging have helped to decentralize corporatecommunications and eliminate the geographical barriers that have restrictedrelationships between people sharing common interests (Scoble and Israel2006). Organizations are using blogs and wikis in conjunction with existingcollaborative tools such as e-mail lists, discussion forums, websites, and Web

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia,Vol. 13, No. 2, December 2007, 187�209

New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia

ISSN 1361-4568 print/ISSN 1740-7842 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis

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DOI: 10.1080/13614560701712667

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portals to facilitate information sharing, knowledge creation, knowledgemanagement, and marketing, and to foster collaboration within theorganization and with partnering organizations (Farrell 2006).

A wiki is a collaborative authoring environment*a readable and writeablewebsite in which potentially all the visitors to the site can create new pages ormodify existing ones, with optional access control to set limits on authorship.Wikis excel at collaboration and are ‘designed to facilitate exchange ofinformation within and between teams’ (Goodnoe 2005), making them idealfor corporate and educational teamwork. Wikis allow distributed teams towrite and edit documents collaboratively over the Internet in a shared onlineworkspace. The advantage of wikis, as demonstrated by the onlineencyclopedia Wikipedia, is that if a contributor makes an incorrect orinappropriate entry or change, other authors or editors can ‘roll back’ to aprevious version or edit and keep the change. A Project Locker (2006)Whitepaper identifies three main categories of wiki-usage as project manage-ment, collaboration, and knowledge management.

Wikis have been described as ‘the easiest and most effective Web-basedcollaboration tool in any instructional portfolio. Their inherent simplicityprovides students with direct (and immediate) access to a site’s content, whichis crucial in group editing or other collaborative project activities’ (Educause2005). Educators are realizing the potential of wikis, considering them as amore ‘formal’ way to synthesize students’ knowledge in a collaborativeauthoring project by, for example, creating a glossary, or co-authoring apaper, or collaboratively writing an essay or a project report (Parker andChao 2007). As a result of several contributors adding material to a wiki, thewiki can grow and evolve, and therefore can address pedagogical objectivessuch as student involvement, group activity, peer and tutor review, knowl-edge-sharing, and knowledge creation (Minocha, et al. 2007).

1.1 Context: VLE programme at the OU and the wiki environment

The Open University (OU) is the largest university in the UK and the UK’sonly university dedicated to distance learning. It was founded to bring highereducation to people who are unable to study at a conventional university. TheOU is for people who want to choose when and where they study. It is perfectfor people with jobs, children, disabilities, or commitments that make it hardto attend a campus-based institution at set times.

Recently, the OU has embarked on an t7.5 m programme to develop itsintegrated virtual learning environment (VLE) to meet the online learningneeds of its 200 000 distance learners. Moodle, the open source VLE, hasbeen adopted by the University and is undergoing extensive development toprovide the required functionality. As a result, the adoption of blogs, wikis,podcasting, and e-portfolios is transforming the ways learning is beingdeveloped by course teams.

The course team of the postgraduate course, Software Requirements forBusiness Systems, in the Department of Computing of the OU has been one

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of the early adopters of the VLE. The course involves teaching systematicelicitation, recording, and communication of requirements of softwaresystems. On a software development project, the elicitation of requirementsis generally carried out by a team of requirements engineers or systemanalysts. In software enterprises, requirements engineers often work remotelyfrom one another, and wikis are increasingly being used for collaborativelydeveloping requirements specification documents (Farrell 2006). In a recentpresentation (November 2006�April 2007) of the course, activities based onwikis were introduced to provide students with the opportunity to engage insmall-group collaboration in order to emulate requirements engineeringpractice, thereby providing students with transferable skills for working withcommunity tools in the software industry. We also hoped that the wikiactivities would help to facilitate learning and the acquisition of various skillsincluding:

. the creation of explicit knowledge from tacit understanding of courseconcepts;

. learning through discussion, disagreement, and consensus building;

. team working; and

. effective communication of ideas to others through networked knowledgeenvironments; articulation, analysis and synthesis of ideas and knowledge-sharing.

In this paper, we describe the trail of empirical work that led to the evaluationof the collaborative wiki activities on the requirements engineering (RE)course. The paper is structured around the major phases of the researchprogramme. Section 2 provides a broad overview of the research and describeshow wikis offer a flexible platform for asynchronous collaborative support torequirements engineers participating on a software development project.Section 3 describes the design and implementation of collaboration and wikiactivities on the RE course. Sections 4 and 5 describe the methodology andresults of empirical evaluation of collaboration and wiki activities on thecourse. Section 6 discusses the research outcomes, and Section 7 describes thesteps that we have taken since the evaluation and our plans for taking thisresearch further.

2. Using wikis to facilitate Web-based learning communities

Organizations including Nokia, Michelin, IBM, Sun Microsystems, andMotorola use blogs and wikis as part of their work practices, for example, inmarketing, knowledge management, communication, and project manage-ment. These organizations require people who possess skills of criticalthinking, analysis, and reflection on practice, and who can participate incollaborative and creative practices (Bruns and Humphreys 2005). Leadbea-ter (2000) states that

Collaborative learning in a wiki environment 189

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knowledge sharing and creation is at the heart of innovation in all fields . . .knowledge cannot be transferred; it can only be enacted, through a process ofunderstanding, through which people interpret information and make judge-ments on the basis of it . . . Great tides of information wash over us every day.We do not need more information, we need more understanding.

Learners build on their knowledge by interacting with each other, theireducators, and their learning materials. This learning process requires socialinteraction that can foster a shared sense of belonging and purpose.Universities, therefore, have a responsibility to produce courses that developstudents’ abilities to be creative, and generate knowledge and sharedunderstanding in collaborative networked environments.

Bruns and Humphreys (2005) suggest that the pedagogical models need tochange from the traditional linear learning paradigms to a social constructi-vist pedagogical model which includes problem-solving in a collaborativeenvironment that requires students to enact knowledge through a process ofshared understanding. There are three main characteristics built into socialconstructivist scenarios: they use complex, realistic problems; they use groupcollaboration, interaction and cooperation; and learners are responsible andset goals, while teachers provide guidance (from Merrienboer and Pass 2003,quoted in Schneider et al. 2003). Social software tools such as wikis and blogsenable the generation of social constructivist scenarios wherein a group oflearners collaboratively construct shared artefacts, create a culture ofdialogue, and negotiate meanings. Wikis help to facilitate student collabora-tion via co-production of text, and development of argument and consensusby communication of ideas through a shared online workspace. Academicinstitutions can use wikis in many forms from the very simple to very complextasks. For example, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver is justone example of a university that employs wikis by staff inside a WebCTenvironment, as a planning tool for courses, as an in-class communicationtool, for collaborative content management and project development, and forcollaborative writing (see: http://ipeer.apsc.ubc.ca/wiki/index.php/Centre_for_Instructional_Support; accessed 21 September 2007).

2.1 Role of wikis in requirements engineering

The process of requirements engineering (RE), involving eliciting, recording,and communicating requirements, is a key activity during the design anddevelopment of software applications, products/services, or business systems.RE involves determining the stakeholders’ (those with a vested interest in thesystem*they are affected by or they affect the system) requirements andpresenting them to the rest of the development team (e.g. designers,developers and testers) in a document known as a requirements specification.

RE is normally performed by a team of requirements engineers. Due to itscommunication and collaboration-intensive nature, as well as its inherentinteraction with most other design and development processes, the practice ofRE is becoming a key challenge in global software engineering (GSE). InGSE projects, cross-functional teams must specify and manage requirements


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across cultural, time-zone, and organizational boundaries. Because of thediversity in cultural and professional backgrounds and interests of the team-members, a critical need exists for members to achieve a shared under-standing of the requirements for the system being developed.

Three types of processes can help stakeholders achieve a shared under-standing in RE (Damian 2007): knowledge-acquisition and knowledge-sharing processes that enable the exploration of stakeholders’ needs; iterativeprocesses that allow the reshaping of this understanding throughout theentire project; and effective communication and co-ordination processes thatsupport the other two types of processes. To support these processes, andparticularly in GSE, wikis offer a flexible platform for asynchronouscollaboration to create requirements specifications iteratively, documentand share knowledge, and manage communications (e.g. Decker et al. 2007).

There were three factors that motivated us to introduce collaboration andwikis on our RE course: (a) the usage of wikis in RE reported in recentpublications and the experience of our industrial contacts in IBM and SunMicrosystems; (b) the need to ensure that our students would acquireexperience of participative RE; and (c) to ensure that our students woulddevelop the skills associated with working with collaborative tools that arebeing used in industrial practice.

3. Approach to collaboration in the requirements engineering course

The course, Software Requirements for Business Systems, is a distance-learning course of 5 months’ duration. The course describes how to analyse abusiness problem and develop a requirements specification that can be usedto determine an appropriate solution to the problem. In this course, weassume that the eventual solution to the problem will be a computer-basedsystem. The course describes techniques and a disciplined approach to theprocess of eliciting, analysing, communicating and agreeing requirements asthe essential first step in the development of software. The majority of thestudents on this course are software professionals who register to update theirskills in creating, analysing, and evaluating requirements. Normally, thestudents are aiming for a Postgraduate Diploma or MSc. Details of thecourse (OU course code: M883) are available at http://www3.open.ac.uk/courses/bin/p12.dll?C01M883 (accessed 21 September 2007).

The key learning outcomes of this course are:

. to identify the stakeholders of a business problem and its solution, andunderstand how to interact with stakeholders and to manage anystakeholder conflicts;

. to resolve conflicts, duplicates and ambiguities in the gathered require-ments; and

. to deal with the varying perspectives and views of different requirementsengineers in a project-team.


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In practice, the RE processes of interacting with stakeholders, managingstakeholder conflicts, and removing conflicts, duplicates, and ambiguitiesfrom a set of requirements are generally performed by a small group ofrequirements engineers who discuss and reformulate the requirements inconsultation with the stakeholders (Robertson and Robertson 2006).

Our aim of introducing collaborative activities in a wiki environment hasbeen to emulate this experience by enabling a group of students to take theroles of requirements engineers in a software-development project. The wikiactivities involve a group of students contributing requirements to the group-wiki, discussing the requirements, identifying conflicts and ambiguities withinthe requirements, and resolving the conflicts through discussions from theperspectives of different stakeholders, to produce an unambiguous require-ments specification.

The assessment on the course involves three tutor-marked assignments(TMAs) and an examination at the end of the presentation. The three TMAson the course involve students in developing a requirements specification fora system that is included as a case study in the TMAs. The wiki activitiesinvolve collaborative development of the requirements specification for thecase study in the TMAs.

There are around 140 students in every presentation. In the OU’s distance-teaching model, students are supported by tutors, with each tutor having agroup of 18 students. The tutor is responsible for supporting the students bymarking the TMAs, regularly interacting with the students and addressingtheir queries and concerns throughout the course, and liaising with the courseteam. To emulate the small group dynamics found in RE practice, we spliteach tutor group into three subgroups, for the wiki activities, of around sixstudents giving a group size that was big enough to cater for the inevitabledrop-out, and small enough to be manageable and effective. One constraintwas to avoid significantly increasing the tutors’ workload. Therefore, wedesigned the wiki activities in a way which, we hoped, would be self-managedby the students and requiring minimal or no intervention by the tutor.

We applied the five-stage model proposed by Salmon (2002, 2004) as aguiding framework while we were designing the wiki activities for the TMAs.We also took note of work on the role of e-moderators in asynchronousconferencing (Keirnan et al. 2003) where the four e-moderator roles arerelated to the Salmon 5-stage model to ensure that the appropriateintellectual, social, organizational, and technical roles were adequatelycovered in the guidance provided to the students about collaboration. Inmore recent work on non-moderated asynchronous conferencing, Keirnan(personal communication) has shown that the same roles must be present butare played by individuals within the group. We also took into account theexperiences of a distance-taught course on team working in a distributedenvironment at the OU based on Tuckman’s model of team working(Tuckman and Jenson 1977).


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3.1 Five-stage model of teaching and learning through online networking

The five-stage model (figure 1) shows how participants in an e-learningenvironment can benefit from working, networking, and learning online, andwhat e-moderators need to do at each stage to help them to achieve thissuccess. The model shows how to motivate online participants, to buildlearning through appropriate online activities and by support from thee-moderator. Since we were not expecting our tutors to perform the role ofe-moderators on the wiki activities, we decided that we would indirectlysupport our students via: comprehensive guidance notes on the wiki activities,regular e-mails of encouragement and addressing any queries that thestudents raise with their tutors or on the course discussion forum or in theire-mails to the course manager.

3.2 Introducing wikis to students

In the first month of the course leading to the first TMA, we plannedactivities that would take students through the first two steps of the model infigure 1.

Figure 1. Five-step model (from Jaques and Salmon 2007, p. 43).


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Although the OU is a distance-learning organization, there are twoopportunities during each presentation for staff to meet students face toface (but both are optional activities and not all students attend): in anintroductory tutorial at the start of the course and in a 3-day residentialrevision school just before the exam. During the first presentation of thecourse at the residential school, informal enquiries with students indicatedeither that they were unaware of blogs and wikis or that they had notencountered them in learning environments. We realized that there was a needto design activities and resources that would help in familiarizing them with awiki environment. So, we decided to provide students with an introductor-y paper on wikis to read and analyse as part of their first TMA. A literaturesearch was performed on the following criteria: the paper should be anintroductory text on wikis; the paper should focus on how wikis are beingused in organizations; and the paper should give some idea on how wikis canbe applied in software development (to cover both course-specific andtransferable skills). We chose the paper by Farrell (2006).

We suggested that the students read Farrell’s paper as a part of the firstTMA, but we also placed many other introductory papers and Web linksrelated to wikis on the course website to enable our students to familiarizethemselves with wikis as collaborative authoring tools and specifically on therole of wikis in software engineering, RE, and project managementapplications. It was important for us to convey to the students that thewiki activities fit within the pedagogy of the course; otherwise the wiki wouldhave been perceived as just another online tool whose only function is to addto the workload on the course. In addition, students were provided withguidelines for using the Moodle wiki and conducting the collaborativeactivities in the wiki, rules of collaboration on the course, wiki-etiquette, roleof each student in a student-group, and so on.

Students were also asked to participate in their individual groups in an ice-breaker activity. Most of our students generally study on their own, and thereare no formally constituted meetings (tutorials) as part of the course.Students have the opportunity to ‘meet’ via a mediated computer conference(forum) for the course, but as this is optional, only a small percentage ofstudents use the facility either to introduce themselves at the start the course,or for interactions or discussions during the course. Therefore, we realizedthat it would be essential to have an ice-breaker session before the actualcollaboration activity which would enable the students to get to know oneanother.

The ice-breaker activity has two objectives: students are able to familiarizethemselves with the wiki environment, and the activity gives them anopportunity to introduce themselves to their fellow group members. Eachstudent is asked to do two tasks in this ice-breaker session: add a smallbiography to the wiki; and enter a stakeholder type from a list of stakeholdersin the case study. The exercise involves very little collaboration in the sensethat little negotiation is required. Care was taken to ensure that there wouldbe no advantage or disadvantage in choosing one stakeholder type rather


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than another. The choice of stakeholder type is actually a preparation for thesecond TMA where each student is asked to discuss the requirements for thesystem in the case study from their chosen stakeholder’s perspective. Studentsare advised to complete this ice-breaker activity a week before the TMAsubmission cutoff date. The evidence of their individual contributions can beincluded in their TMAs by copying and pasting the log from the ‘History’section of the wiki (the ‘History’ function in the wiki records all the changesand contributions made to a page in a wiki; however, enhancements to thewiki tool are planned that will allow tutors to see the contribution levels ofindividual students).

3.3 Collaborative requirements engineering

The wiki activities in the second and third TMAs aim to provide practicalexperience of requirements development to emulate real practice. Theactivities have been designed around key course concepts so that studentscan develop shared understanding and situated meanings via collaboration.Following the stage 3 of ‘information exchange’ in the model of figure 1, thecollaboration in these two TMAs involves students individually contributingrequirements to the wiki and then discussing them to arrive at an agreed set ofconsolidated requirements.

The second TMA involves each student in a group adding threerequirements to the wiki from the perspective of the stakeholder chosen inthe first wiki activity. The aim here is to populate the wiki with a set ofrequirements from the perspectives of a variety of stakeholders so that thestudents (in their role as requirements engineers) can practice RE skills. Onceall the students have entered their set of requirements, the collaborationinvolves discussing duplicates, conflicts, and ambiguities with the aim ofachieving an agreed set of unambiguous requirements for the system in thecase study. Students can also use the forum for discussion while performingthis collaboration.

The collaborative activity in the third TMA involves each group checkingthe accuracy of the requirements developed in the second TMA andspecifying a fit-criterion (a quantified measure) for each requirement. Thedevelopment of suitable fit-criteria can be difficult if a requirements engineeris working on their own, and better-quality fit-criteria can be obtained by agroup of requirements engineers working collaboratively. Hence, the wikiactivity asks the students to agree on a set of fit-criteria for the requirementsdeveloped in the second wiki activity.

For educators, the most important issue in wiki environment is that ofassessment: establishing the levels of contribution of respective groupmembers in collaborative writing. It is also important the students are clearabout what they will be assessed on and what weight each portion of the workcarries. Mejias (2005) states that the students should be informed that theywill be assessed not only on their contributions but also on how theydocument their experiences and discuss how social software contributed to


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their success or failure. This type of assessment is aided by the wiki’s‘versioning capability [which] can show the evolution of thought processes asstudents interact with the site and its contents’ (Educause 2005). Otherfacilities such as time-stamping, revision history, and discussion in the wikihelp to provide a permanent record of student ideas and participation fortutors (Bruns and Humphreys 2005; Raitman et al. 2005). Especially incollaborative projects, the students need to feel they are gaining something,and this helps to ‘promote ‘‘pride of authorship’’ and ownership in the team’sactivities’ (Educause 2005).

The marking is based on both the student’s own contribution to the activityas well as on the product of the activity. A significant advantage of the wiki isthat it records each and every change to the document, which means thatthere is evidence of each student’s contribution. In the TMAs, students areasked to report on their individual contribution to the collaborative activity,quoting evidence from the wiki which, of course, can be verified by the tutor.There is a sliding scale of marks given to an individual for the process and theproduct based on the level of their contribution supported by evidence fromthe wiki and the student’s own account.

3.4 Reflection during and after collaboration

In order to assess the effectiveness of the wiki activities in collaborativeauthoring of requirements and to elicit students’ perceptions of their learning,we asked students to reflect on their experiences before and after performingthe collaborative activities in the wiki environment. Further, the students’reflections have enabled us to evaluate whether collaboration and onlineinteractions have facilitated knowledge creation (stage 4 of figure 1).

Reflection is a strategy that facilitates learning (Moon 2000). It is the re-examination and re-interpretation of experiences and is central to effectivelearning and development. To help students get started, we provide areflection template containing some ‘trigger’ questions or ‘probes’ to helpthem think about the various elements of the course as they work through it.The reflection is performed along three dimensions: on experience of usingthe wiki as a tool; personal views of the course and collaboration inparticular; and the role of collaboration in RE. Students are asked to examinethese three dimensions in each collaborative activity and to record theirexperiences. This can be done with any suitable tool (word-processor or evena paper-notebook) but we encourage students to use Moodle’s PersonalJournal tool. Further, the practice of reflection on this course, which isuncommon on professional computing courses (Hazzan 2002), will con-tribute towards their development as reflective practitioners.

4. Research questions

As members of the course team and in our role as educators, we havebeen keen to receive feedback from students on their experiences on


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the collaborative activities*whether the collaboration contributed to orenhanced their learning of the course concepts. Next, as researchers ofe-learning environments, we are interested in investigating the pedagogicaleffectiveness of wiki as a tool for collaboration in distance education and theeffectiveness of collaborative activities in the wiki environment towardsthe students’ learning experiences on the course. In much of the literature onthe use of Web 2.0 in education, there seems to be an inherent belief thatbecause the tools allow collaboration, this will naturally result in learning or‘‘offer the opportunity to embed collaborative, constructive learning muchmore extensively in our educational environments’’ (McMullin 2005).Consequently, we have focused on the following high-level research questions:

. Q1: Did the wiki activities facilitate collaborative learning as intended?

. Q2: Is a wiki a good medium for collaborative work in a distance-learningcourse?

. Q3: What are the challenges in collaborative writing and requirementsdevelopment?

To address these research questions, we devised a set of more concretequestions to elicit feedback from students. In the third TMA, which wasscheduled in the last month of this 5-month course and after the students hadcompleted the wiki activities, we asked the students to report on thereflections that they had been recording in the reflection template throughoutthe course. These reflective questions are related to one or more of theresearch questions listed above:

1. Where was your understanding of the RE process enhanced by yourinvolvement in collaborative exercises? (to provide input for Q1)

2. Is a wiki a good medium for collaborative work on a distance educationcourse? (for Q1, Q2, and Q3)

3. Is a wiki a good medium for collaborative requirements development? (forQ1 and Q2)

4. Does collaborative authoring contribute to a better requirements engi-neering process? (for Q1)

4.1 Data sources and data analysis

Since the reflective question of the TMA had 15% marks allocated to it, themajority of students answered it (we had responses from 117 students). Ofthese responses, we have analysed a random sample of 40 (34%). In thissample there were 9 (22.5%) females and 31 (77.5%) males compared with 20(17%) females and 97 males in the full data set. All students on the course areadults studying part-time and, in our sample, 23 (57.5%) were studying otherOU courses simultaneously with our course.

Along with the reflective accounts in the third TMA, we collated andanalysed discussions by students on the forum (40 in all), direct e-mails fromstudents discussing their wiki experiences (15), and e-mails from tutors (14)


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discussing their perceptions of the wiki activities and their experiences withstudents in their tutor-groups.

Using the research questions to guide us through the collated data, weperformed an inductive analysis of the various accounts to identify theemerging themes, sub-themes and the inter-relationships between them. Thisinvolved:

1. Collecting the forum discussions and e-mails from students and tutorspertaining to the wiki tool and collaborative activities into a MicrosoftWord document.

2. Extracting the reflective accounts from the assignments for each of thefour questions into a Word document.

3. Reading the different sociological accounts in detail to gain an under-standing of the positive accounts and the obstacles that had beendescribed in the data.

4. Identifying the emerging themes for both the positive accounts andobstacles, guided by the research questions. From these emerging themes,the top-level common themes were identified. The lower-level themes werefound from multiple readings of the data.

5. Analysing the accounts in e-mails and the discussion forum in a similarway.

6. Assigning the sociological accounts from the various sources to the themesand sub-themes of which they most explicitly conveyed the core essence.

7. Validating the cataloguing scheme through dual-coding by independentresearchers (coders) in order to ensure that the sorting criteria wereimplemented effectively and that the sorting process was consistent. Theprocess was iterative and the two researchers (authors of this paper) met toexamine any discrepancies. These were resolved through discussion, andthe sort criteria (the themes) were merged and documented. Followingthis, another subset of data was sorted independently using the agreedcriteria. Again any discrepancies were resolved, and the sort criteria wereupdated accordingly. This process was repeated one more time (three sortsoverall) until discrepancies were minimized. Each time, the categories ofthemes and sub-themes became more concrete and more fully articulated.Finally, the entire data set was sorted using the stabilized sort criteria, andthe two independent sorts were compared for consistency.

5. Findings

In this section, we look at each of our research questions in turn and discussthe evidence which addresses these questions. We present the evidence thatsupports the proposition that our wiki activities facilitated collaborativelearning and that a wiki is a good medium for collaborative work in a distanceeducation course. However, we have evidence that there were obstacles toachieving high levels of facilitation that present us with challenges for the


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future. The evidence, presented below, is from a variety of sources as discussedin Section 4.1.

5.1 Did the wiki activities facilitate collaborative learning as intended?

The purpose of investigating this question was to evaluate the pedagogicaleffectiveness of a wiki in a distance-learning environment. The students’accounts show that collaboration enhanced their learning on the coursethrough clarification, re-interpretation and re-assessment, and reflection. Thestudents noted that these benefits accrued by engaging in collaboration,giving and receiving comments, peer review and assessment, and reflecting onthe collaborative activity. Table 1 provides an indication of the overallstrength of opinion of these major issues taken from our sample of 40 studentreflective accounts (our analysis has shown that the comments in the e-mailsand in the forum are consistent with these data).

We now describe eight types of evidence that we found and provideillustrations with some typical student responses:

(1) Student understanding of course concepts was enhanced in two ways: theirpersonal understanding of certain course concepts such as the need forrequirements to have a fit criterion, and the benefit of engaging incollaborative activities to improve the requirements specification. Thefollowing quotations are typical:

I have gained a better understanding of why a requirement needs to have a FitCriterion rather than just a description.

By working [through] the activity it did improve my understanding of gatheringand refining requirements.

A major barrier to understanding requirements is that people make assump-tions. It is only when these people get together and discuss the problem thatmissed requirements and inconsistencies are identified.

Such comments have a further significance for us in that they highlight thoseparts of the course where students have difficulty and where our originalcourse materials may need improvement.

Table 1. Strength of opinion (N�40).

Issue Strength of opinion

Did the wiki activities facilitate collaborativelearning?

26 said yes; 5 said to some extent (77.5%)

Did the wiki activities enhance understanding ofRE?

30 said yes (75%)

Was reflection effective? 33 said definitely; 5 said to some extent(95%)


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(2) Students benefited from the comments they received from fellow students.There was evidence of peer review and feedback, and to give feedback was asvaluable as receiving it:

In both assignments I would have submitted my contribution believing that therequirements were unambiguous and the fit criteria well defined. However, thepeer review provided by the collaboration showed that this was not the case.

Even though I understood exactly what I was trying to specify, it wasn’t until Ireceived feedback, and, indeed, gave feedback that I realized that some of whatI had written was open to misinterpretation.

(3) The students’ appreciation that collaborative requirements engineeringhas benefits was improved. In particular, they saw the significance of takinginto account the views of different stakeholders.

. . . it does not seem possible, to me, to elicit an adequate requirementsspecification without the assistance of as many stakeholders as possible. This isa view I already held and was confirmed through the collaboration on thecourse.

(4) Students were able to clarify their understanding of core course concepts:

The discussions from this activity helped me to reflect on my own views andpotentially modify them (and the requirements) to incorporate the good ideasthat arose from the group.

(5) Students felt that peer review and assessment helped them to reassess theirunderstanding of the course concepts and to reflect on their individualcontributions and learning:

When members of the group began to question what exactly I was testing, itprompted me to reassess exactly what I was trying to achieve through the fitcriterion.

The collaborative activity allowed me to see how the others addressed thisquestion and evolve my own contribution and understanding based on these.

(6) Students thought that self-reflection was helpful in evaluating theircurrent view and modifying their understanding and the specification of therequirements:

The discussions from this activity helped me to reflect on my own views andpotentially modify them (and the requirements).

(7) Students appreciated the role of multiple viewpoints in clarifyingunderstanding:

Improved results. The collaborative approach incorporates more views; [if]properly managed, this usually leads to better results.

(8) Students acknowledged the collaborative construction of knowledgewithin the group:


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The group knowledge quickly becomes aggregated in one place instead of beingdispersed throughout multiple communication channels. This improves re-quirements engineering since the quality and tempo of team interaction via thewiki has been enhanced.

Thus, students provided evidence that collaboration, peer review andreflections all contribute to a greater understanding of course concepts andimprove learning.

5.2 Is a wiki a good medium for collaborative work in a distance-learning course?

Students raised a number of positive reasons why they felt that a wiki is agood medium for collaborative work when they are remote from one another.There were four major themes that emerged: the continual availability of thewiki, its facilitative qualities, cost savings, and traceability.

(1) The wiki is available whenever the student wishes to access it, whichenables students to fit the collaboration into their individual lifestyles:

The wiki is a good medium for collaborative work on an OU course as itprovides a central point of access since the location of its members is spread farand wide across the country and even the world. The tool is accessible 24�7.

(2) It facilitates collaborative work:

It is difficult to see how our group could have produced and reviewed a set ofrequirements in the space of 2�3 weeks without the Wiki. I found the groupdiscussion pages useful to make suggestions to other members of the group andto make arrangements for editing the TMA Wiki.

(3) Wiki-based collaboration can help reduce travelling costs for face-to-faceteam meetings:

Online wiki-based collaboration will be less expensive than hosting meetings ata site to which each travel member needs to travel (and possibly stay in hotels).

(4) An important concept within the course is that of requirementstraceability*the need to ensure that it is evident that a requirement for aproduct is implemented and that every feature of a product is the result of arequirement. Some students recognized that the history function of a wiki(where a record is maintained by the wiki of each and every change made)enables traceability of the development of requirement by a group:

It [the wiki] allows a history and audit trail of documentation to beautomatically maintained and referenced in the future therefore enablingtraceability of requirements through to development.


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5.3 What are the challenges in collaborative writing and requirements development?

The students noted a number of disadvantages of collaborative authoring,some of which were ameliorated by the use of the wiki and some that wereexacerbated. In the part-time distance-learning environment of the OU,students have the expectation of studying in their own time, and anycollaborative activity is considered to be a burden because it imposesadditional synchronization points. Normally, our students have a smallnumber of deadlines: one for each tutor-marked assignment (there were threeof these on our course) and an end-of-course examination for which studentsmust travel to an examination centre. Such deadlines can be difficult to meet,depending on the students own circumstances, the inevitable unforeseenemergencies that can arise in everyday life, and the study pattern thatindividuals choose to adopt. To impose additional deadlines by requiringstudents to discuss and agree a set of requirements was a challenge that weknew would have to be faced.

I found the collaborative [activity] very difficult to participate in, with the job Ihave I travel a lot and the collaboration relied on you being available for the last5 days or less before [the TMA] deadline to see everyone’s contribution. Sowhilst I see it a valuable benefit . . . for the requirements engineering process Isee the emphasis . . . on the Wiki work as being slightly biased against theindividual that doesn’t have this flexibility in their life style.

I tend to study once every few weeks and do several chapters at once*basically,I organise my studying around my life. Now . . . I’m being asked to organise mylife around my studying.

The fact that a wiki is an asynchronous medium does mean that students canaccess it when it suits them. The editing of the document and the reading ofothers’ contributions do not, in themselves, impose specific deadlines, but theneed to discuss issues and reach a conclusion in a relatively short time doesimpose severe limits on when this activity can be carried out. There is a needfor students to agree specific periods when they can collectively engage withthe discussions (this is a known problem that arises even in the context ofcollaboration using a forum). However, with an inhomogeneous group ofpeople, the collaborations can occur sporadically, which can be frustrating forstudents when they have to wait for others to contribute:

Where a wiki does not work well with OU studies is the sporadic nature ofgroup members’ contributions. Some will contribute a lot at one time and thennot return for a number of days.

On the other hand, some students felt that the asynchronous environment ofwiki was an advantage in allowing group-members to contribute at a timethat suits them:

In terms of collaborating on an OU course, the benefits seem to outweigh thedisadvantages; it is difficult for all people collaborating to be able to arrange apre-determined time to collaborate, so using the wiki as a collaborationmedium is quite effective.


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Nevertheless, having to wait for others to contribute was one of the mainobstacles in the positive experience of the students. As one student said,‘‘Effective collaboration requires regular contributions’’. In the literature (seeBritcliffe and Walker 2007, for example) there are reports of the unwillingnessof students to engage effectively in collaborative wiki work because they donot want to amend others’ work. We did not find this to be a significant issue,although there were some criticisms of peer review:

Some students just weren’t professional and felt they had the right to criticiseother students work without being constructive.

In other words, students did not mind critiquing others’ work, but the natureof the critical reviews was not perceived as being positive by some of thestudents.

There were several technological obstacles that were uncovered whilepursuing this research. There were three specific obstacles related to the userinterface of the wiki environment:

1. The editing window in the wiki was small and did not provide enoughcontext and content for the document being edited. Students had to scrollthe content up and down while they were entering text in the wiki via thisediting window.

2. The wiki navigation was poor because the user always has to return to theroot page before reviewing another branch.

3. Users had to check the wiki on a regular basis to see whether there hadbeen any contributions from other group members. As one student said,‘‘It would have been good to have some mechanism for requesting alertson certain pages to save you constantly having to check’’.

A major technological obstacle was the absence of a locking mechanism onthe wiki to avoid the problems of concurrent updates. On our request, thesoftware developers modified Moodle’s wiki for the third assignment so that aparticular wiki page on which a student (in a particular student-group) iscurrently working would be locked for usage by other students in thatstudent-group. However, the implementation was not as effective as we wouldhave liked:

Depending on the Internet connection and traffic volume at the time this is canbe a frustrating user experience, especially where a user is locked out untilanother user has finished updating the wiki.

The collaborative activities involved receiving feedback from group membersand discussing issues to arrive at an agreed set of requirements. We hadsuggested to the students that they should use the wiki not only forcollaborative authoring but also as a discussion medium. Over half thestudents in our sample referred to the inappropriateness of the wiki fordiscussion. The following view was typical:

The . . . Wiki is a poor tool for keeping a sense of order to these multiplediscussions. The Wiki does not create a ‘thread’ that can be followed. The Wiki


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does not clearly identify the contributor. The Wiki does not clearly time stampcontributions. The Wiki does not separate discussions about points so a greatdeal of searching is required before a thread of a discussion can be followed.

Over half the students in our sample mentioned the need to engage in someform of synchronous communication for discussion and debate ranging fromface-to-face sessions to telephone conferencing. Many suggested the use of aforum so that there could be identifiable threads of communication. Indeed,some groups did engage in some form of synchronous communication(instant messaging). The students were generally in agreement with the viewthat while a wiki has strengths in recording decisions and for supportingcollaborative authoring, it needs to be supported with some form ofsynchronous discussion medium to facilitate timely decision-making.

Another major obstacle was the relative lack of socialization between groupmembers. The students do not meet face to face in this course, and therefore itis only through online socialization activities that the students will get toknow one another. Since wikis can be used successfully for socializationpurposes (Naish 2006), we incorporated an ‘ice-breaker’ into the firstassignment, but this proved to be inadequate, and several studentscommented on the difficulty of working with a group of relative strangers:

Where project teams already know and understand each other, electroniccommunication is fine. Where strangers do not, all non-verbal communicationis lost, leading to misunderstanding and potential conflict.

We took a deliberate decision not to assign roles to individual members ofgroups, leaving groups to be self-managing. Some students found this aproblem:

To optimise collaborative authoring (and therefore the quality of the output)roles and responsibilities for authors are required to ensure issues such asidentifying dependencies and conflicts between requirements can be fullyresolved.

In spite of the obstacles, some students felt that the wiki did meet their needsfor collaborative requirements development:

In the requirements process I see a structured Wiki being a very powerful toolin deriving requirements from many people on a large project that may belocated around a country or the world. It centrally brings all the requirementstogether for all to see and update constantly. It allows more experiencedEngineers to have an input in remote projects that in the past would haverequired reports to go back and forth, whilst losing time and competitive edge.

6. Discussion

We can conclude from the feedback received from students and tutors andour subsequent analysis that wiki activities on the course facilitated thelearning of course concepts and students’ appreciation of the distributednature of the RE process. Some students expressed reservations about thecollaborative work in a distance-learning part-time course, and this is


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understandable. In an institution such as the OU where flexibility in studyingpatterns is one of the main advantages that it offers, collaborative work canseem inflexible. However, if we continue to emphasize the pedagogicaleffectiveness of the collaboration in students’ learning, development of theircommunication and team-working skills, and transferable skills for industrialpractice, the students will be better able to appreciate the benefits ofcollaboration. Indeed, the positive feedback we have from this cohort ofstudents can be fed forward to prospective students to reinforce this fact.

Our analysis suggests that we can emphasize the role of collaboration byencouraging students to become more aware of current practice in the use ofwikis in RE. Therefore, we are planning to introduce readings (papers fromconferences/journals) on global software engineering and distributed softwaredevelopment so that students can see how wikis, or any sort of collaborationor communication in distributed networked environments, are an integralpart of RE.

We adopted a non-prescriptive approach to team-working and deliberatelyavoided discussing with the students issues relating to group management,such as coordinating group responses or organizing dates and times for groupdiscussion. However, based on our analysis of the second and third researchquestions, in the next presentation of the course we shall discuss the relevanceof these factors but still expect students to be self-organizing. Furthermore, toaddress the time-constraints for group-working in part-time learning, we canoffer or suggest appropriate tools to be used in conjunction with the wikiwhich can make the collaborative process smoother and less time-consumingthan it has been previously. For example, we have already suggested tostudents that they should consider using a simple meeting scheduler, e.g.http://www.meetomatic.com/calendar.php (accessed 21 September 2007), toplan a schedule for collaboration and synchronous communication. We arealso encouraging students to use instant messaging for discussion of thefeedback that they receive from one another while collaboratively developingthe requirements specification in the wiki environment.

Unlike some other wikis, the Moodle wiki does not have an embeddeddiscussion forum, and it is essential that students have a usable discussionmedium. In the last presentation of the course (results of which have beenreported in this paper), we asked students to use a separate wiki page fordiscussion to keep it apart from the requirements specification document andto provide a record of the discussion for our analysis. The feedback from ourstudents has encouraged the OU to develop the Moodle wiki to incorporatean in-line commenting facility, and we shall be incorporating its use at theearliest opportunity. Until this happens, students will be encouraged to useother discussion tools of their choice such as a group-blog, a discussion forumor even an e-mail list. Giving students this flexibility will enable them tochoose tools that meet their skills and needs.

There has been some discussion in the literature of the need to ensure thatstudent engagement in the use of wikis is dependent on their confidence withthe tool (de Pedro et al. 2006, Britcliffe and Walker 2007). However, our


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students were generally unaware of wikis at the start of the course andcertainly could not be said to be proficient in their use, and did not commentupon any difficulties in using the wiki. Nevertheless, we found that a lack ofrobustness of the software can be demotivating (Chen et al. 2005).

Perhaps the most important deficiency in the present scheme is the relativelack of socialization between group members. The students do not meet faceto face in this course, and there are two significant limitations with ourcourse: its short presentation period (5 months) and the need to involvestudents in collaborative wiki activities at an early stage. The result is thatthere is little time for students to engage in essential socialization activities.While we did incorporate an ‘ice-breaker’ into the first wiki activity, this hasproved to be inadequate, and several students have commented on thedifficulty of working with a group of relative strangers. We have decided,therefore, to experiment with group blogs (one for each small student group)that will be active from the very start of the course. A group blog will serve asa space for socialization for students and, if required, for having a time-ordered record of their discussions should the students wish to separate theproduction of the requirements specification in the wiki from the rationale ordiscussion.

As with every technology, usability is the key attribute for a positive userexperience. The usability obstacles with the wiki tool including the editingwindow being too small, the inappropriate locking mechanism, and thediscussion/rationale being separate from the requirements specification weremajor concerns of our students and tutors, and gave us the impression thatthe tool was disrupting the learning experience. It has been a bigger challengefor us to convince the software developers that these seemingly trivial aspectsof the tool are crucial to the students’ learning experiences.

Finally, as is common in group-working settings and also reported inresearch on computer-supported collaborative environments (e.g. Hampelet al. 2005, Notari 2006, Britcliffe and Walker 2007), our students weresometimes hesitant to change the contributions of others or comment on oneanother’s contributions, and some of them felt that the peer assessment wasnot constructive, although there is some counter-evidence reported in dePedro et al. (2006). Therefore, we feel that we need to put in more thought tothe design of socialization activities via the group-blog and ice-breakeractivities to take care of these concerns.

7. Future work

At the time of writing (September 2007), the software developers have justpresented us with a redevelopment of the Moodle wiki in which majority ofour concerns have been taken into account: comments can now be includedwithin the wiki text on per-section and per-page bases allowing group-members to write and comment on a section or on the page. This‘commenting’ facility addresses one of the obstacles that our studentsexperienced with having the collaboratively authored text separate from the


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discussion page. The commenting feature is particularly useful for our courseas the students are expected to review each other’s contributions beforearriving at the combined set of requirements. The new commenting facility isequivalent to having a ‘discussion forum’ within the wiki*allowing for therationale or discussions to be captured alongside the text/document. Theother features that have been included are: customizable page locking whichallows for the systems administrator to set the time-period for which the wikican be locked by one author*so for example, it could be set as 10 min for asmall activity (e.g. ice-breaker) and could be 30 min for the activity thatrequires contribution as well as peer-reviewing; the editing window has beenenlarged with enhanced editing and formatting features; inclusion of RSSfeeds for page changes; improved presentation of changes in the historyfeature; and improved printing and export facilities.

We intend to adopt the ‘new’ wiki in the May 2008 presentation of ourcourse, and we will evaluate the effectiveness of the new features. However,such a move will necessitate a review of the guidance documents (for studentsand tutors) and the wiki activities to analyse the effect of the new features onthe pedagogy. We believe that the introduction of the RSS feed will be a greatbenefit to our students who are studying part-time and do not wish tocontinually check whether the wiki has changed.

We shall be devising alternative socialization activities in such a way thatthe short time-period between the course start and the first collaboration isused as effectively as possible. We have already brought this issue to theattention of students in the guidance documents for the next presentation(commencing in November 2007) and have suggested ways in which theymight socialize: for example, introducing themselves, and planning at an earlystage the schedule for the collaborative activity to be carried out in TMA02.We hope that planning and negotiating a time-schedule will aid socialization.In a future presentation of the course (May 2008), we intend to investigate therole of group blog as a socialization medium.

We are also considering whether to generate a sense of presence of fellow-learners in the virtual space through real-time interactions within a 3-D multi-user virtual environment (MUVE). Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com)is an example of 3-D MUVE and is being increasingly employed by academia(e.g. Lim et al. 2006) and industry for a variety of initiatives that fit with ourneeds of collaborative designing, organizing meetings, and interviews. Virtualworlds such as SL offer realism, immersion, and interaction, and a sense ofpresence for the ‘Avatars’ which may facilitate relationship-building, which isan antecedent for effective operation of a virtual team. We are planning to setup workspaces and activities in the Cetlment Island of the OU in Second Lifefor real-time interactions such as: ice-breaking tasks; holding meetings in SLand making notes/keeping records of transcripts of conversations in SL (forreporting in TMAs).

We are continuing to monitor the student experience of collaborativeauthoring and collaborative requirements development through the reflectionaspects of the assignments, student- and tutor-interviews, as well as formal


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university end-of-course surveys to see how effective our changes are inpractice, and we intend to present our findings in future publications.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our students and tutors on the course for their feedback and inputs. We

would like to acknowledge the support of our colleagues at the Open University, UK in the

implementation and maintenance of the VLE and the wiki environment: Niall Sclater and Mat

Schencks of the VLE Programme, Ross MacKenzie, Sophie Gudgion and Andy Allum of the

OU’s Learning and Teaching Solutions group; and to Pam Brightman, David King and

Arosha Bandara of the Computing Department for their inputs on the design of collaboration

and reflective activities.

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