Rubrics/Wiki Rubric Development

History of Wiki Rubric Development
A current ongoing research project into the use of Wikis for Education is being conducted at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. It is the outcome of an inaugural Griffith E-Learning Fellowship (GELF) in 2006. This page both documents the project and allows for development of different scenarios based on Wiki Pedagogy.

2006
The first Mobile Workforce Technology (MWT) Wiki produced mixed results. Students were enthusiastic and contributed a great deal of information. In some ways, the wiki provided an unexpected outcome through providing space for students to display their own identity. As the rubric (below) for this was based more on product than process, students produced many, many pages. These pages included detailed displays of their home countries as well as pages relating to MWT.

Instructions to students
Students were provided with an overview of expected activity within the wiki, although with a caveat that the upper limit of activity was unknown. This was to prevent students working only to the standard, while rewarding students who actively engaged within the course wiki. This had both positive and negative outcomes as the maximum levels turned out to be quite high.

Participation

Interactions between students will be recorded by the Course Wiki. Each time a student updates a page, provides mentoring to a fellow student or responds to mentoring from a fellow student will indicate a participative event. These events will be the basis of student participation. The assessment of participation will be based on the frequency of all students’ participation. Students who participate more than average will achieve higher marks. The kinds of participation include page edits (that is, the number of times a student updates a page), pages started (that is, the creation of a wiki page), comments, responses to polls/surveys/quizzes (when enabled) posted within the wiki, the maintenance of their userpages (that is, a page about themselves) and private messages to other users to organise collaboration/ask a question/clarify an entry etc.

Table 1 - Marking scheme for types of activities in TikiWiki

As the wiki is a new form of participatory environment within the learning toolbox, the maximum values are not set for many activities. Minimum standards are set which, generally will result in half the available marks, with the exception of UserPages and Private messages. At the end of the semester, all student activities will be collated, and students ranked based on the number of each activity. Clusters (that is, students who achieve very similar numbers of each activity) will receive similar marks. Example of rankings for editing and starting pages are shown below. (Numbers not indicative of amount of work necessary. The highest number of page edits may be in the hundreds.)

Table 2 - example of marks (to be wikified and copied in later

Calculation of marks
The process of assessing the first MWT wiki required two markers and three computers. Due to the overwhelming response of students to creating pages and to contributing to many different pages, the process involved assessing each page for its contribution to the wiki as a whole (and to the information about the topic), then investigating who contributed. For each edit, a 'value' was assessed, that is,
 * was it the creation of the page
 * was it a minor edit which corrected a formatting and/or spelling - things that related to clarity,
 * was it informational - adding information to the page,
 * was it an image that helped explain things
 * was it a link between wiki pages or external

Thus students were rewarded for different contribution styles in multiple ways.

This reflected the kinds of activities that were undertaken, however, the process was unweildy and, in some ways, unfair to students whose contribution was of a more restrained and thoughtful manner. Thus, attempts were made to also assess the quality of the page overall, and the quality of the contribution. This provided a more robust process, although it was still not well refined.

All of these processes contributed to the second attempt to 'get it right in the wiki' in 2007.

2007
The second version of the MWT wiki saw an increase in the number of students from a small group at post graduate level to a larger (almost double) group as well as an undergraduate contingent. The process for this wiki was slightly different with processes of development occurring in the background and students publishing their final version to the articles feature in TikiWiki.