Designing Knowledge Management Systems for Teaching and Learning with Wiki Technology

Journal of Information Systems Education, Fall 2005 by Raman, Murali, Ryan, Terry, Olfman, Lorne

The instructor stressed that the class would be conducted based on collaborative efforts among students and the instructor. The class was designed based on the principles of discovery learning (Pieters et al. 2004). Students were given the opportunity to learn from one another and to use the instructor as a resource for creating, refining and maintaining their knowledge management system.

4.3 Wiki Settings

The design of the system was not guided by any particular theory. The technology was configured to allow students to perform the following functions:

* Link pages automatically.

* Create new pages from a main or source page.

* Perform markup functions such as text editing.

* Participate in online forums and quizzes designed by other students.

* Find specific pages or content by using the search function.

* Create blogs -personal Web pages used to express anything related to class content or discussion.

The wiki home page had various elements such as links to new concepts, news and class updates. One segment developed by the class was called the 'Article Review' where students were encouraged to summarize a total of 160 articles on knowledge management based on a predefined format. This was done in teams and anyone could review and make changes to any article reviewed.

4.4 Grading Scheme

The course grade was based on performance in three formal assignments: knowledge management system project (40%), knowledge base contribution (40%) and class participation (20%). Everyone in the class received forty points for the system project. The maintenance of most sections of the TikiWiki implementation was not complicated and the assignment of students to each part was somewhat arbitrary. Given that this was a very difficult assignment to calibrate, the instructor decided that giving everyone the same number of points (the maximum) was the only fair way to grade this component of the class.

The statistics he used to calculate the forty (knowledge contribution) points were (1) Total: The number of creations and updates of wiki pages; (2) Unique: The number of different pages created and/or updated; (3) Article Review: The number of article review pages created and/or updated; and (4) Time: An estimate of the total time spent updating pages. The first three measures were directly derived from counts of a database of wiki page activity for the semester.

The fourth measure, Time, was also derived from this database, but it was an estimate. However, the instructor believed that it to be a relatively valid estimate. To make this estimate, he first calculated an elapsed time estimate for each session. A session was defined as a continuous set of page creation and/or update database entries where the previous entry was made less than one hour before the current entry. He summed all of these times to calculate the total time. Next, he weighted each of the four measures as follows: (1) Total - 35%; (2) Unique - 10%; (3) Article Review - 15%; and (4) Time - 40%. These weights were estimated based on correlations among the various measures as well as his best guess of how well each of the measures would mirror knowledge base creation activities. Since the instructor stressed time of usage, he made this the most important factor. The instructor realized that there may be discrepancies in these estimates, which also led him to give each student 40 points out of 40 for the knowledge management system project score.