History: aw2l 2.1 Introduction

Introduction

This communication is the second part of the one entitled "Writing documents collaboratively in Higher education using Traditional vs. Wiki methodology (I): QUALITATIVE results from a 2-year project study" (from now onwards, called as “the first part”). This one focuses more on the quantitative results obtained in the frame of the two projects cited there (UniWiki – 2003MQD00167, and UniWiki-Redice 2005ICE-UB).

We wanted to know if Wiki methodology reduced the need to use some other ways of distant communication, if it reduced typical organizational problems at doing group assignments, if students obtained better yield of the time invested, and also the degree of satisfaction that students obtained using each methodology. Moreover, we wanted to know if Wiki methodology allowed reducing the time invested onto some tasks commonly needed to complete the group work.

Introduction

The results shown here are framed within the same context as reported in the previous communication (De Pedro et al. 2006).

Several TikiWiki sites were configured (Figure 1), one for each subject participating in the UniWiki project, to allow single cooperative virtual communities for each subject (one per subject , Table 1).



Each TikiWiki collaborative portal site was later on manually configured to host different work groups, since AulaWiki module to automatically allow and configure work spaces was not yet developed by then (De Pedro & Reyes 2006). Each work group had manually created by the teacher their own private forum, file galleries, Wiki pages, ... as many TikiWiki resources, and as private or public as needed for the specific case of configuration needed for each subject.