An investigation into the impact of using group Wikis to facilitate project based learning in the first year of an engineering degree programme

Tom Molyneaux

School of Civil, Environmental and Chemical Engineering, RMITUniversity, Melbourne, Australia

Abstract: Implementation of a Wiki as part of an engineering project based design exercise is shown to facilitate the project management and design process. The technique effectively substitutes for the lack of communal work environment and enhances the instructor’s ability to observe team dynamics thus facilitating timely feedback and intervention.

Introduction

Background

There is a need for engineering graduates to learn to work effectively in teams – this involves developing such abilities as teamwork, communication, presentation skills, problem solving, autonomous learning, project management as well as technical skills. Project/Problem Based Learning (PBL) is recognised widely as an effective way to achieve this – Engineers Australia encourages the adoption of such techniques in their accreditation requirements (EA 2004) and the Engineering Australia graduate attributes were the central theme around which the Civil and Infrastructure degree programme was redesigned in 2003 (Hadgraft 2003, 2004). The programme concentrates on educating students on the whole of lifecycle performance of infrastructure (as opposed to design and construction) and on the responsibility of the engineer with regard to sustainability of the built environment. Project Based Learning was adopted as the dominant teaching paradigm throughout the programme.

The theme for the first year (the transition year) is ‘connection’ – aimed at helping students make the transition from a school existence, to beginning a purposeful career in engineering. The idea is to help them connect with themselves, their colleagues (staff and students), a sustainable approach to engineering (the profession), and the university. Helping them to become a self-directed, self-evaluating learner is a key step in this process. There are two project based courses that focus on this process – one in each semester of the first year.

Engineering creative practice involves developing a design from an initial need/idea through development of initial concepts to technical assessment and then detailed description. If the PBL approach is to be an effective means of education in this domain then the working practices adopted by the students must be similar to those adopted by the practitioners. This poses particular challenge as the student environment and their behaviour can differ significantly from that of the work-place.

This paper focuses mainly on the use of a team-based Wiki as a tool to facilitate the collaborative work undertaken in the first semester course (CIVE1185 – Engineering Skills). The wiki has however been used in the way described on both first year PBL courses and in a second year design course in Chemical Engineering.

The course

General

The (CIVE1185) Engineering Skills course is a core course for first year Civil Infrastructure, Civil Infrastructure/Business Management and Environmental Engineering programs. It is also taken as an elective by other engineering and science students across the University. This diverse cohort of students has increased in number from 60 in 2003 to 260 in 2008. Students gain experience of conceptual design in a sustainability context through a series of lectures, tutorials, field classes and a group based project. In 2008, students chose one of several development proposals in Melbourne’s YarraValley- a recreational lake andrestaurant, a community centre oran outdoor stage/theatre. Each team of 5 or 6 studentswas given the freedom to select their own site and to develop team proposals/designs.

The main learning objectives for this course are:

Developing knowledge of (civil and environmental) engineering, including the role of sustainability principles in engineering

Developing generic skills, including working effectively in small teams, problem-solving and decision-making, communications skills, accessing information, time management and goal setting

The large enrolment was managed by organising a weekly lecture for all students and then splitting the students into 8 tutorials for a 2-hour long workshop where they would work in teams.

Assessment of team work

Students are assessed as a team for several key presentations and for the final report. The marks for the presentations include 50% contribution from peers (the other teams) and 50% from the instructor. Feedback shows that students are comfortable with this approach and particularly appreciated the use of a keypad system that enabled the peer feedback to be available immediately after each presentation. It is however the marks for the project report that in the past has attracted feedback that expresses concerns regarding the fairness of giving all team members the same mark. Students are keen that the grades properly reflect the levels of performance/contribution of each student and that it is possible to make adjustments to better reflect variations. In particular they feel that there should be a system to reward hard workers and to address the issue of team members who do not contribute and get ‘a free ride’. These concerns are common throughout the project based work and there have been several solutions proposed by others (James et al, 2002). It is generally accepted there is a need to assess the processes within team work as well as the products or outcomes (the final report). Such arrangements can also reward individual team members who carry a proportionally heavier load or who make a more significant contribution than do their team colleagues. Previously in an attempt to improve the fairness of the marking a peer review was undertaken whereby each student assessed each other’s contribution and these assessments were used to modify the marks. To avoid this approach being vulnerable to abuse and the vagaries of team dynamics the marks were only modified if there was good independent evidence from the facilitators notes/experiences or elsewhere. As a result marks were only modified in extreme cases. It was hoped that the wiki would give better insight into the individual contributions and team working practices and thus enable an improved scheme to be adopted. This issue is discussed below in the light of experiences with the Wiki

The challenge of team-based project based learning in an engineering education environment

Experiences from the project based design course outlined above and other such observations made over a 15 year history have highlighted the following issues with regard to assisting students to learn the organizational skills required of team work.

Regarding the students:

  • The students find it difficult to keep a team identity/focus – because they tend to leave campus after timetabled activities and tend to work at home rather than on campus - frequently late at night and at weekends. They usually have part time jobs and possibly caring commitments.
  • The off-campus on-line working practice makes it difficult for them to
  • benefit from the social network of the team
  • develop and share knowledge as a team
  • maintain a team repository (design file) of design data, reflections, meeting notes etc.
  • progress team output/deliverables such as the presentations and the final report.
  • Many are concerned regarding the marking of team work – in particular the marking of the final product (the report). They consider it unfair for team members who did not contribute adequately (had “an easy ride”) to receive the same mark.

In addition the instructor is faced with challenges:

  • The instructor finds it difficult to ascertain whether there is an effective team dynamic. Are all the members contributing and are they working as a team? Problems within the team often only become apparent at a late stage in the semester, hence limiting any chance of effective intervention.
  • In response to students concerns regarding the fairness of team marks for the final report - staff would like to assess the process – make assessments of individual contribution as the work progresses. It is difficult to gather reliable information to justify unequal distribution of such marks.
  • Theteam can hide lack of effective working practice and progress from the instructor – usually in the belief that they can catch up or solve any problems later.

Many of these challenges do not exist in the workplace but are particular to students and staff involved in team work on engineering projects in an education/student environment. In the workplace there would be an office-centred environment and consequently there would be more personal contact and there would be a design file (or electronic equivalent) containing all meeting notes, technical data etc. All team members would have easy access to this file or management system. There would also (normally) be a high motivation towards the project being successful from all the team members.

In an attempt to assist with some of these issues, over recent years first year project-based exercises had included the extra deliverable of a team web site describing their project. This was originally introduced to encourage the development of web authoring skills – however it was frequently observed that generally only one team member developed such skills (or already had them) and s/he acted as web master – entering all data. The web page development however did yield an un-plannedbeneficial spin-off of improving team work. By looking at the web pages, as they developed, the instructor could offer feedback on progress. The students were asked to put on-line their project time-line and meeting notes, briefing papers from their research and then, as the project progressed, final report contents, draft sections etc. The web page became a management tool and a repository of their knowledge and output and as a result the students’ project management improved. Unfortunately the pages were often out of date because they had to pass on to the web master their individual contributions to be uploaded. With the growth in the availability of Wikis – in effect a web site that can be edited on-line by each of its members - it was clear that this should be the next step and this coincided with a timely development at RMIT - the implementation of TeamsLX – a Wiki in the Blackboard distributed learning system.

The Wiki in education

Wikis are widely accepted to have started in 1995 with the launch of Ward Cunningham’s wiki (at however it isWikipedia, the web-based, free contentencyclopaedia, started in 2001 whichhas widely spread theconcept.

Educational usage has been driven by the potential for collaboration with Wikis being used throughout education – from school to higher education. There has been successful use of Wikis in teaching since 2000 with CSL’s (Collaborative Software Laboratory) use of CoWeb (Guzdial, 2001) and studies under the European SEED project (Schneider, 2002) exploring potential learning activities.In 2004 Schwartz surveyed the use of Wikis in universities and observed that the majority of cases were adopting structured/guided formats for use on specific coursework rather than encouraging more generally personal use. She also observed that universities were rarely using them for administrative scheduling, faculty administration, provision of learning support materials, or course management. Athorough bibliography of Wiki pedagogy is provided by Renee Fountain (2005). Lamb (2004) provides a summary of the essence of Wiki technology that may be summarized as:

  • An ability for anyone to change/create content using a simple ‘hypertext markup’ language
  • Contributions are not anonymous but content can become anonymous by virtue of multiple edits.
  • The content/edits are timeless – not sequential (as in a blog)
  • The content is ‘work in progress’ frequently with gaps and blanks

The current state of Wikis in education is discussed by Parker and Chao (2007). They conclude that, even now, higher education has only recently begun to explore the potential educational value of Wikis and that interest is growing, evidenced by the increase in the number of publications on the subject.

It is clearly apparent by exploring the various Wiki formulations currently available that facilities/capabilities vary and there have been adaptations to suit a wide range of fields of work. In particular there have been developments in Wikis to improve their suitability for team work and project management.

TheWikifor project work

Wikis have been used to manage and guide project work in software development since the first developments. EPS Software Corp. developed such a system in 1999 (EPS, 1999) to mange their projects. In particular the system facilitates management of product development and consultancy contracts. Particular features include allowing the client to see the progress of the product, constructs for creating ‘to do’ lists and structures to monitorproduct life cycle - identifying goals and requirements, establishing examples (cases), design and finally the implementation. A more widespread tool is the popular and freely available web-based project management tool Trac (Trac, 2007). Trac is an enhanced Wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. It provides a document version control system - allowing users to keep track of changes made over time to any type of electronic data, tracks tasks through timelines making the acquisition of an overview of the project and tracking progress very easy. The University of Sydney has used the system to assist team work in student teamprogramming exercises and they have developed an add-on that provides feedback to the instructor on individual activity – in terms of setting and completing tasks and contributing to content (Kay, 2006).

RMIT have been committed to using the Blackboard course management system for several years. The web-based system facilitates lecturers in their management of courses and gives students on-line access to their coursework material, offers facilities for assignment submission, grade book viewing, and discussion groups. The Campus Pack LX Suite (Learning Objects, Inc., 2007) is an add-on to Blackboard and was purchased in 2006 as a means to provide students with an e-portfolio and access to Wikis and blogs. The Wiki facility within CampusLX (the Campus Pack LX Suite) called TeamsLX has been the focus of the study reported here.

The implementation of TeamsLX has the following main characteristics that influence its effectiveness as a project management tool.

  • Students and staff have to login to the Blackboard system - available on-line on and off campus to students registered on the course.
  • Links can be made to any available object on the internet.
  • The Wikis can be configured by the instructor(s) so as to both allow access and to be visible to a sub-set of students selected from the class list.
  • Purging of pages (permanent deletion) can be allowed (or restricted) to students
  • Optionally the Wikis can be open for reading and commenting to all students
  • The wiki cannot contain Blogs – the CampusLX implementation of Blogs cannot be used to create a Blog as an object within the wiki. However these can be created as separate CampusLX entities within the course or links can be made to external Blogs from within the Wiki.
  • Page history is available to Wiki members (students) with the facility to revert to any previous version (whilst keeping all versions).
  • An analytical tool is available to the instructor(s) that assesses individual Wiki member contributions (time contributed and size).

Implementation

In the light of the experience with student web sites, the objective has been to use the Wiki as a tool for the students to manage the process of project management and for the instructor to manage the learning process. In an engineering working environment the process of project management will differ in detail, depending on company policy/facilities, individual manager characteristics etc. However there are common attributes that would be considered desirable in any such process. Typically one would expect such activities as planning and holding meetings, taking minutes, assigning actions, managing tasks in a timeline, following up actions, monitoring progress, guiding the design through from initial conception stage, cataloguing and filing documents, keeping track of document versionsetc.

The students were introduced to the Wiki in the first lecture and its intended use explained in the following terms.

  • The Wiki was to be used as a project management tool - the equivalent of a traditional office ‘project design file’. This file would normally contain all information relating to that particular job – meeting notes, drawings, research information, site reports, etc. It was explained that many companies now have such systems.
  • It was also explained that the Wiki should include explanation of the design progress and the rationale behind decisions.
  • All presentations and the final report were to be uploaded to the Wiki before the specified deadlines.
  • Individual contributions to the Wiki would be assessed on a weekly basis and used in conjunction with the peer review to allocate individual marks to the final report. The method of allocating such marks was described (See above in ‘assessment of team work’).

Each project team was given access to an initial Wiki that had been seeded with a basic structure (Figure1). It was stressed throughout the workshops that this initial structure was just a suggestion and that they were free to change it as required to fit their working methods. The secondary-pages, linked from the home page, were as follows: