“Using Camtaisia Studio 6 to create "how to" movies for student Blackboard wikis (and additional "how to" movies for colleagues to set up wikis).

Andrew Cree, BA (Hons), MSc (Econ), MSc, Chartered MCIPD, PGCE (Teesside Business School, University of Teesside).

Conference theme: Innovation

Introduction:

What is a wiki?

The word “wiki” comes from the Hawaiian phrase “wiki-wiki” which means quick. A wiki is an easy to create website that simplifies the process of creating HTML web-pages. A form of this technology is provided in Blackboard. Creating a wiki within Blackboard is relatively easy for those who are comfortable and experienced in using software. Parker and Chao (2007) point-out that “Wiki is a major component of Web 2.0”- that is the emergent generation of web-tools that have potential to “...complement, enhance,and add new collaborative dimensions to the classroom” (Parker and Chao 2007).

Wikis in Blackboard:

Blackboard make use of software fromanother provider-Learning Objectives Inc- and their Campus Pack LX Suite. The software to create wikis is within this pack and is called TeamsLX. Molyneaux (2007) identified the main characteristics that influence TeamsLX effectiveness as:

  • links can be made to any object on the internet
  • the wikis can be configured by the instructor so as to both allow access and be to be visible to a sub-set of students selected from the class list
  • purging of pages by students can be allowed (or restricted)
  • an analytical tool is available to the instructor that assesses individual wiki member contributions (time and volume/size)

(Molyneaux 2007)

Wikis for digital natives:

At last year’s HEA Conference (Harrogate 2008) I attended Dr Molyneaux’s session on wikis and found it very inspiring. As an innovative user of Blackboard I immediately saw the potential of Dr Molyneaux’s approach especially his useful tips such as: create a wiki template and then simply copy it as many times as there are groups. Dr Molyneaux’s use of wikis struck a particular chord with me as at the same time I had co-authored and delivered a couple of conference papers about what Prensky called “Digital Natives”: young people- our students- who are used to consuming information in a rich multimedia way and are used to leaning in and interacting with computers. Prensky argues that there has been a radical generational shift which separates the current generation of students from all previous generations– “today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach” (2001, p1). He suggests that there is no going back – students today haven’t simply changed incrementally as happened between previous generations (e.g. adopting new slang; styles and fashions). Instead, there is a huge discontinuity caused by is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology. Young people – our students – grew up with this new technology, they have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers. They are, in Prensky’s terms, “native speakers” of the digital language of computers and the internet. They use this technology on a daily basis and Prensky points to research showing the average American college graduate has spent over 10,000 hours playing computer games but only 5,000 hours reading during their life to date. In both my papers last year (Cree 2008a and 2008b) I reported my Business Ethics students spending an average of 30 hours a week using computers for social networking (e.g. My Space and Facebook) and university work, which confirms Prensky’s point – this is a generation immersed in digital technology, that engages with computers, the internet, and the more esoteric functions of mobile phones with the same ease and familiarity with which their parents engage with newspapers or television, letters and telephones. Prensky calls this generation the digital natives.

I could see that having digital native students create assessed group wikis would add variety to my final year undergraduate Business Ethics and Corporate Governance course. The assessement had been 50% exam and 50% individual assignment. Wikis became 5% of the assessment, assignment 45%, and exam 50%. The wiki would be created by the groups in the run up to Christmas and students had a free hand in the topics chosen.

From Dr Molyneaux I took the idea of creating a wiki template (in my case limited to 4 pages with instructions about expectations) and copied it over nine times. To create 9 wikis from a template takes literally a few minutes in Blackboard and adding the names of the group members is equally quick.

My innovations:

While I found Dr Molyneaux’s presentation inspiring I also realised that his approach could be improved on. Since 2003 I have been a very enthusiastic user of Camtasia Studio and have created many movies both for students and colleagues (including a guide ot Blackboard: “Cree’s Guide to Blackboard”). I could instantly see that an enhancement to Dr Molyneaux’s approach would be to create an “example wiki”: that is a wiki created by me the lecturer showing the students the quality to aim for and indicative of effort and number of sources required. For each feature in the wiki I created “how to “ movies using Camtasia Studio and rendered in swf (Flash) format. Each of these movies was embedded in the wiki next to the feature being described ( for example the movie “how to place a picture in a wiki” was placed next to a picture and “how to create a hyperlink” was placed next to a hyperlink. A further innovation was to create a number of movies for colleagues in Teesside Business School showing them step by step how to set up and assess wikis on their own Blackboard sites: the ideas being to allow colleagues to very quickly get up to speed with wikis by simply following the steps in the “how to” movies. This also ties in with Prensky’s labelling of our older generation as “Digital Immigrants”: all this technology is new to us and some of us may need a helping hand.

Aims:

The aim of this paper is to establish whether the student experience of wikis on the final year undergraduate Business Ethics and Corporate Governance course at Teesside Business School makes assessed group wikis a worthwhile addition to learning and toevaluate whether my innovations using Camtasia Studio 6 combined with Dr Molyneaux’s approach outlined at the conference in 2008 work in terms not only of student feedback of the experience but in marks achieved. Is there a basis for expanding the use of assessed group wikis within Blackboard across UK campuses?

Methodology:

The group wikis constituted 5% of the assessment for my final year Business Ethics and Corporate Governance course. 47 students were enrolled on the course and each of them joined one of 9 groups in the first week of the academic year (membership of groups was left entirely up to the students with the guidance that I wanted 4-5 members per group. The names were then given to me and using the Blackboard software it took a few minutes to copy over the wiki template 9 times and enter the names of group members. Looking at the module listing of results only one student did not join a group and he received no marks for the wiki task (interestingly he also received the lowest mark for the individual assignment and rarely attended class).

I spent the first tutorial explaining what was required and gave the students a tour/demonstration of the “example wiki” I had created (around the topic of the business benefits to Whole Foods Market of creating a micro-finance charity: the Whole Planet Foundation). Key to this was highlighting the existence of the hyperlinks to “how to movies” and I spent time playing some of these movies. In the second half of the tutorials (the 47 students were split into 2 tutorial classes) students went to the Business School computer lab and in groups logged onto the Blackboard site, became familiar with the contents of the wiki button (eg “example wiki”, the template for their group wiki, and a copy of the wiki marksheet).

I was very fortunate at last year’s HEA Conference to have the opportunity to talk to Dr Molyneaux after his presentation and having swapped email addresses he kindly sent me the survey questions used at his university in Australia- RMIT. I used this questionnaire- “Wikis with Campus LX: Assessing the Student Experience” together with the “Teesside Business School Module Evaluation Questions” form. Both questionnaires had room for free text answers. I also used 20 minutes of the last teaching session of the year to talk to the entire class about their experience of using wikis (there are 47 students studying Business Ethics and Corporate Governance this year and as the last session was a revision class there was close to full attendance).The wikis were assessed in late December so in tutorials between October and the hand in I also had feedback from students as work was progressing. I also looked at the hard data: do the marks for the wiki differ from the marks for the assignment (at the time of writing this paper- April 2009- the exams had yet to be taken).

Results:

The two questionnaires were completed by all the students present at the final teaching session (that is 42 of the 47 students enrolled: the response rate was so high because I deliberately made use of the first half hour of what was to be the revision class and this ensured near full attendance).The key findings from the RMIT questionnaire “Wikis with Campus LX: Assessing the Student Experience” were very positive. The questionnaire contains two boxes for free text comments to the following questions: “In what ways has participating in a wiki affected your learning?” and “Overall, what are your views on the use of wikis in your course?”.

“In what ways has participating in a wiki affected your learning?”:

3 students said they found it had no impact on their learning at all; of the remaining 39 students 7 didn’t write anything but the remaining 32 used very positive and enthusiastic words; typical of these comments:

“”provided the opportunity to continually update and research a specific topic area”

“it made me more confident with technology”

“it was fun and made my learning experience easy”

“Overall, what are your views on the use of wikis in your course?”:

As with the previous question 3 students were negative and 7 other students didn’t bother writing anything. The majority of students had positive views about the use of wikis BUT urged the weighting be greater than 5%, typical comments:

“I enjoyed creating a wiki- something I hadn’t done before and the short movies were really useful”

and

“It was fun and quirky”

and

“Good to do something other than a written assignment or exam, although a bigger percentage could have been given”

and

“It was an interesting change to the way we normally learn. I think the only problem was the fact that it was only worth 5% of the total marks”

The RMIT questionnaire also has 15 tick box questions (on a scale of “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree”. Again 3 students were largely negative but the remaining 39 students were mostly positive (boxes for each of the13 questions being either ticked as “Strongly Agree” or box before it (Which would equate to “Agree”). The strongest response was to the question:

“My wiki was easy to create”

and

“I have received enough support and direction on the construction of my wiki in my course”

and

“I have been provided with constructive feedback on my wiki work”.

The only two questions where people “Disagreed” or “Strongly Disagreed” being:

“The wiki has encouraged me to evaluate my current strengths and weaknesses”

and an obscure question about educational behaviour regarding plagiarism (having used the RMIT questionnaire it may be the question had more significance in that institution).

Teesside Business School Module Evaluation Questions:

Our evaluation form at Teesside Business School has 14 tick box questions (none mention wikis) and space on the back for free text feedback about likes and dislikes. The feedback from students was uniformly verygood/excellent. Most students this year as last year singled-out my innovative use of technology (eg movies created using Camtasia Studio; lectures using pictures rather than bullet-points). This form evaluates the whole course and looking at the free text comments few students mentioned wikis. I think this is partly because they also completed the RMIT questionnaire and spent time in a class discussion with me about the wiki. But it is also possible that in the context of a year long course an assessment carrying 5% of the marks isn’t high on the list of things students want to mention.

How do group wiki marks compare to individual assignment marks?

Students scored markedly higher on the group wiki than on the individual assignment (6 of the 9 groups got a mark between 72% and 77%; 1 group achieved 65%; 1 group achieved 60% and 1 group 58%- giving an average group mark of 70%), in contrast the average mark for individual assignments was 61%. From my informal discussion with the students it is clear that most of them found it an interesting and fun activity; they found it easy to create the wiki and for those who weren’t tech-savvy they appreciated the “how to movies”: several students in the early part of the year told me how much the movies helped them rapidly pick gain the skills to create a wiki; they picked their own group; there was a social aspect to the activity; they liked that I added real time formative feedback (easy to do with Blackboard wikis: there is a comment button for lecturers to use); and within reason they were allowed to pick their own topic (ranging from the Farepak Scandal to the Grameen Bank to use of taxpayers money for the London Olympics).

Unexpected results:

In addition there are some unexpected results which are worth reporting: first I set my default page as the blog. The blog has a counter giving the number of views , this number is the same as the number of visits to the site. After 20 weeks of teaching the 47 students had a total of 2,700 visits: that is nearly 3 visits per week. I am not suggesting that wikis alone drove this traffic but as part of a bundle of technology including blogs, movie guides, movie book and article reviews, wikis played a part in creating a compelling proposition for busy students to visit this one Blackboard site 3 times a week in addition to attending 2 hours a week of teaching. Secondly, a number of students reported that having access to the 9 wikis was an interesting way to get extra material for the course: in other words that student generated content was being used by other students. Thirdly, as a digital immigrant lecturer I found not only did some students learn from my movies but I learned new skills from the most tech-savvy students: for example one group of students found a way of inserting You Tube movies in the wikis such that the full movie and surrounding player with controls is visible on the page waiting to be played. Seeing this for the first time was amazing for me and I posted a comment on the wiki asking how they placed the You Tube movie- a few days later they showed me in their tutorial! Needless to say this new skill will be passed onto next year’s students by way of a movie.

Discussion:

From the information reported in this study about the student experience of wikis on the final year undergraduate Business Ethics and Corporate Governance course at Teesside Business School, introducing assessed group wikis appears to be a worthwhile addition to learning. The overwhelming majority of students either “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that the experience was a worthwhile one. Wikis are seen by students to befun and interesting, offer variety, and allow them to provide user generated information in a way that dovetails with their “Digital Native” lifestyle. The hard data from the marks shows that the average mark is 11% higher than for individual assignments (though this could of course be due to a host of factors and not necessarily that wikis in and of themselves improve student performance). Other hard data shows that, on average, each student is visiting the Blackboard site 3 times a week (and while this isn’t due to wikis alone, wikis are a part of the explanation). Students understood what was expected of them (partly due to the 24/7 availability of my “how to” moives) and appreciated the inclusion of an “example wiki” setting a standard to aim for with embedded swf format movies explaining and showing how each feature was created.

Conclusions:

The results suggest that the introduction of assessed group wikis was very well received by the vast majority of students who liked the variety wikis offer and found the experience of creating a group wiki both interesting and fun. To get the best out of students the assessment weighting should be greater than 5% (perhaps 15-20%). While Wiki technology (including that used on Blackboard) is relatively easy to learn, students (especially those who are apprehensive about using software) appreciate the “how to movies” alongside each feature in the “example wiki”, and in and of itself the ”example wiki” is appreciated as something to aim for in terms of quality.