User:Jtneill/Presentations/Wikis in open education: A psychology case study

Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE) Open Educational Practice Special Interest Group Webinar #4 2023: The untapped power of wikis for open education and information literacy Tuesday 13th June 2023

Google Slides Video (24 mins)

Abstract
James Neill will present on a project using Wikiversity as an experiential playground for teaching psychology students to learn about editing, creating, and collaborating together through co-creating open educational resources. This shared authoring project is constantly evolving and now consists of 1300+ student-developed online chapters on psychology topics about motivation and emotion. The principles that inform this approach include: open education, guided experiential learning, and self-determined learning.

Bio
James Neill is passionate about open academia, which means sharing knowledge openly. He works as an Assistant Professor in the Discipline of Psychology at the University of Canberra, Australia, where he teaches an undergraduate psychology unit called Motivation and Emotion. Previously, James has taught personality and individual differences, social psychology, and research methods in psychology. He is a custodian of English Wikiversity. James also has research expertise in outdoor education and green exercise, and more broadly in positive psychology and environmental psychology.

Activity
I'd like to share today about the potential of using wikis in open education.

To get the ball rolling, I invite you to share about your wiki experiences and curiousities in the chat. Here's a few prompts that may be useful:
 * 1) What is your wiki expertise? (e.g., novice, learner, competent, expert?)
 * 2) What wiki experiences or projects have you engaged in? (e.g., Have you edited Wikipedia or any other public wikis? What wiki platforms are used in your curricula? What learning outcomes or assessment affordances do wikis offer?)
 * 3) What questions or comments do you have about using wikis in open education?

We'll let that chat run in the background, while I share some thoughts about how wikis can turbo-charge open education. Then we can circle back to discuss some of your thoughts and questions.

Introduction
I'm an old hack. I've tinkered with various tools, techniques, and platforms in open education over the last few decades. In so doing, it has become apparent to me that wikis offer some remarkably underutilised open education affordances. Wikis are free, open, and easy to edit, with full version control. Wikis offer a powerful conduit for staff and students to access and contribute to the knowledge commons. Wikis offer an ideal platform for developing collaborative online authoring skills across all disciplines. Teaching students how to edit wikis can improve their communication skills, digital literacy, and provides interactive experience of the knowledge commons within their discipline.In this presentation, I hope to illustrate some of the educational potential of wikis by using an ongoing case study in which has undergraduate psychology students have developed over 1300 online book chapters about motivation and emotion topics since 2010 as part of an authentic assessment exercise.

Open academia
I identify as an open academic which means that I value openness, freedom, and transparency in education, research, and service.

In particular, two principles of the open knowledge movement serve for me as axioms for open educational design:
 * 1) Open by default – educational material should be “as open as possible” and only “as closed as necessary” (European Commission Directorate-General for Research & Innovation, 2016) (e.g., use fully open licences such as CC-0, CC-BY-A, CC-BY-SA rather than restrictive licences such as all rights served and CC-by-NC).
 * 2) Everything should be maximally re-usable – educational materials should be open to edit and maximally reusable, such as by using open formats (e.g., svg for images rather than png).

Following these open academic principles seems to naturally lead to wiki, much as following a water course naturally leads to a larger body of water.

Wiki features
Several wiki features offer great open education affordances, with few downsides.

Openly editable content
The most notable feature of wikis is that they provide a robust system for managing openly editable content. This contrasts with many, if not most, approaches to creating and sharing open educational resources which aren’t publicly editable. To take the most trivial example, if there’s a typographical error in an open textbook, it can’t be readily fixed by a reader.

Quick
Wikis are the quickest, simplest, most open form of content editing on the web. Wiki comes from the Hawaiian term “wiki-wiki” meaning quick (Hiskey, 2010).

Easy to learn—and empowering
Anyone can quickly learn how to edit a wiki. Students can be taught wiki editing basics for a complex assignment within an hour. Most students find it empowering to realise how easily they can shift from being a content consumer to a knowledge commons contributor.

Wikimedia Foundation sister projects
Wikipedia, the best known wiki, is the largest encyclopaedia in human history created by crowd-sourcing using infrastructure support by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). The WMF also supports several sister wiki projects on the same platform, including Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wiki Commons, Wikidata etc. Each sister project has unexplored potential applications in open education and higher education.

All WMF sister project content is available under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. CC-by-SA allows maximum re-usability whilst ensuring that open knowledge continues to built on the open educational resources.

Wiki Education is a separate non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting teachers who wish to engage their students in editing Wikipedia as part of assessment. Wiki Education’s mission is to engage “students and academics to improve Wikipedia, enrich student learning, and build a more informed public”. I encourage you to check out the Wiki Education website to see examples of how academics engage students in editing and improving Wikipedia articles: https://wikiedu.org/.

Wikiversity
However, Wikipedia can be a crowded and difficult place, especially for novice teachers and students, and it is only for encyclopedic information, so has limited scope from an educational perspective. It is important to help teachers and student to build their online editing confidence and gain momentum and traction with their efforts. For this, and several other reasons, will highlight the open educational affordances of the other WMF sister projects, particularly Wikiversity. Whilst Wikipedia is for encyclopedic knowledge, Wikiversity is for teaching, learning, and research.

Check out the English language Wikiversity: https://en.wikiversity.org/. Anyone can edit and create content on Wikiversity, including teachers, students, and the public. There are many ways to explore Wikiversity, but for fun, try refreshing the random link multiple times to cycle through resources which include curriculum, lesson plans, assignments, lectures, and activities.

As you refresh the random link, you might eventually come to something like these two conclusions:
 * There is a lot of material about a wide range of educational topics - there are over 30,000 open educational Wikiversity resources, although this is 1/200th (half a percent) of the 6 million+ articles on Wikipedia
 * Most of the resources lack sufficient development. There is a great need to build out the breadth, depth, and overall quality of Wikiversity’s open educational resources, many of which are in nascent “stub” status.

Case study
So, how might Wikiversity be used in higher education?

By way of example, I teach a 3rd year psychology students a unit called Motivation and Emotion with about 150 students per year. Here is the Motivation and Emotion unit on Wikiversity, including lectures, tutorials, and assessment: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Motivation_and_emotion. The aim of the unit is to help students understand what makes people think and feel the way they do, and how our motivational and emotional lives can be improved through psychological theory and research.

Students are tasked with a major learning and assessment project which is to produce an open educational written resource (a 4,000 word online book chapter) and a multimedia resource (a 3 min video) about a specific motivation or emotion topic. Each student selects a unique topic, so that they are covering an aspect of motivation or emotion that hasn’t been covered by another student.

Let’s have a look at how the project is scaffolded.

Topic selection
Students sign up to a unique instructor-generated topic or negotiate their own unique topic and have it approved by the instructor. Here are the topic selection guidelines: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Motivation_and_emotion/Assessment/Selection. You can see the 2023 list of topics under currently under construction for Semester 2: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Motivation_and_emotion/Book/2023

Initial training
Students are trained in basic wiki editing skills and shown how to import a template to help them get started with structuring and planning their online book chapter. Intermediate wiki editing skills are taught as the semester unfolds and advanced wiki training is provided on student request and as required. For more details, see these lectures and tutorials which are each open educational resources:
 * Lecture 01: Introduction - https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Motivation_and_emotion/Lectures/Introduction
 * Lecture 02: Historical development and assessment skills - https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Motivation_and_emotion/Lectures/Historical_development_and_assessment_skills
 * Tutorial 01: Topic selection - https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Motivation_and_emotion/Tutorials/Topic_selection
 * Tutorial 02: Wiki editing - https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Motivation_and_emotion/Tutorials/Wiki_editing

Topic development
The initial tasks for students are to do some initial reading about the topic, plan a structure, brainstorm content, provide key references, add a relevant image, and to add a brief bio on their user page. Here are the topic development guidelines: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Motivation_and_emotion/Assessment/Topic. The topic development plan is submitted as a low-stakes assessment item and the instructor provides feedback. Here is an example of an excellent topic development about disappointment: https://en.wikiversity.org/w/index.php?title=Motivation_and_emotion/Book/2022/Disappointment&oldid=2420355

Book chapter
Students progress to authoring a 4,000 word online book chapter about their topic. Here are the book chapter guidelines: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Motivation_and_emotion/Assessment/Chapter. The chapter should provide an interesting introduction to the topic, focus questions, integration of relevant theory and research which demonstrates critical thinking, and a conclusion with take-home messages. It should also include learning features such as links to other related chapters, Wikipedia articles, and external resources; images and tables; and exercises such as reflection questions or quizzes. Here’s an example of an excellent book chapter about behavioural economics: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Motivation_and_emotion/Book/2022/Behavioural_economics_and_motivation

Multimedia presentation
Having completed their book chapter, and now being experts on the topic, students create an engaging 3 minute multimedia overview which describes the problem, psychological science, and take-home messages. Here are the multimedia presentation guidelines: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Motivation_and_emotion/Assessment/Multimedia. The presentation is made available for public access on any platform. Here’s an example of excellent multimedia presentation about the hidden costs of reward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV_VzbAVl5I

Output
Since 2010, this project has produced over 1300 unique online book chapters. All the student-created online book chapters can be navigated here: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Motivation_and_emotion/Book via search, browsing by year, or browsing by category. Each resource also appears as an individual listing in internet search engines.

Collaboration
For the sake of simplicity, I’ve so far described this learning and assessment exercise as an individual activity. However, collaboration is strongly encouraged and incentivised. As part of the topic development exercise, students edit or comment on at least one other chapter, and log this as a social contribution on their user page. Making logged social contributions is 10% of the marking criteria for the topic development and for the book chapters. Bonus marks are awarded to students who make exceptional social contributions. Contributions can include wiki edits and comments, discussion forum posts, contributing images to Wikimedia Commons, and using the unit’s hashtag on social media. For example, see the #emot22 Twitter discussion: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23emot22

Students are often confronted at first by the idea of making their work public, but soon come to realise the potential benefits as other students and myself, as the instructor, jump in to help by making useful edits. There is a natural reward here as students who take risks to draft their content online attract more attention and receive more collaborative editing help. Other students prefer to work offline and upload content as they go. If students are unwilling to produce work online under an open license, they can negotiate an alternative assessment format. This has only happened once. A student with a visual disability preferred to use their own word processor.

Unhelpful edits are remarkably rare, almost always unintentional, and are easily reversible through version control which allows rolling back to any earlier edit.

Support
All of this may seem daunting to an instructor unfamiliar with wiki environments. The good news is that there is plenty of community support from technically and educationally competent WMF editors. For example, I am willing to mentor anyone interested. Much simpler projects are also possible. For example, Prof. Ben Rattray, a colleague from University of Canberra’s Discipline of Sport and Exercise Science has students write short research article critiques about exercise as it relates to disease using Wikibooks: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Exercise_as_it_relates_to_Disease. Many teachers may prefer just to share their curriculum openly with others via Wikiversity, using it as an editable open educational resource, and not necessarily to engage students in collaborative editing.

Conclusion
Wikis are well aligned with open education values such as accessibility, transparency, and editability. Engaging students in open, online, collaborative editing develops their confidence in sharing ideas and expressing themselves online, using technology, problem solving, and managing projects in a dynamic environment. Students respond well to being empowered to choose or negotiate their own topic and completing a complex task with scaffolding and support. As an experiential task, students experience highs and lows as they learn new editing skills and develop their topic knowledge. The instructor’s key task is to model openness and problem solving. In conclusion, wikis are underutilised in open education and higher education, so take a look at how they might turbo-charge your curriculum.