The UOC launches a guide to promote the use of Wikipedia in universities

Barcelona, 5 October 2015. From today, university lecturers have at their disposal a Best Practice Guide to Use Wikipedia in University Education in their classrooms. The manual, available in English, Catalan and Spanish, seeks to help extend the innovative use of open access educational resources on the Internet and can be downloaded free from the project website Wikipedia for Higher Education (wiki4HE Project) of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3-UOC). The initiative forms part of the results of the broad research led by Professor Eduard Aibar and is framed within the RecerCaixa research programme of excellence promoted by "la Caixa" Foundation in collaboration with the Catalan Association of Public Universities (ACUP).

In order to prepare the publication, since 2012 the research team has been revising the most relevant university teaching practices undertaken in this field at international level (some of them at Columbia, Harvard, Yale and MIT). Based on analysis of over 50 experiences, the guide features 18 detailed examples and a set of recommendations for lecturers wishing to know more about designing their teaching practices or getting started in this kind of exercise.

It also includes a section of resources with information and references on other teaching experiences at national and international level and educational programmes that promote these practices (such as a list of educational WikiProjects on the Catalan Wikipedia), as well as an introduction to how Wikipedia works and open access educational resources.

A very common practice consists of expanding already existing articles on Wikipedia, adding text, references or multimedia contents. For example, in a degree subject in the field of Humanities, students were encouraged to edit articles related to the concepts worked on in class so they can be considered "featured" articles by the Wikipedia community.


Multiple educational benefits

Several studies identify multiple educational benefits related to the use of the 2.0 tools in learning processes, not only to improve and expand many specific and general skills, relevant in most university courses, but also to introduce new roles in the classroom and improve the transfer of knowledge. In the case of Wikipedia, we can note that it:

1. Fosters different interaction and communication skills.
   
   Editing content necessarily involves being in contact and working with other people, including a generic and indeterminate public, and the Wikipedia community in general. In these interactions, debating and argumentation skills to defend editing and corrections made by the student can be improved.
    
2. Develops writing and comprehension skills.
   
   In particular, it fosters the academic style of writing with a preference for objective facts, summarization skills, the neutral point of view and multiple references to other sources. Given that editing can consist of translating and adapting articles from other linguistic versions of Wikipedia – or, at least, a critical comparison with the information they provide – skills in the use of other languages can also be relevant.
    
3. Strengthens the ability to critically analyse and assess content.
   
   The preparation of activities prior to editing an article strengthens the student's ability to analyse content. Moreover, critical assessment of the quality and reliability of different information sources needed for the documentation process is also fostered, and this obviously requires searching for information and knowledge in different sources (not only the Internet) and formats. Lastly, accurate and appropriate references and citations are needed for the sources used to prepare the text.
    
4. Increases student motivation.
   
   Most teaching experiences with Wikipedia in the university context show a clear increase in student motivation. Instead of their essays or exercises being read and assessed only by lecturers – and then consigned to oblivion – students see how their contributions to Wikipedia can be useful for many people, both inside and outside the academic world. Therefore, students are aware that they are carrying out an activity in the "real world" and not just a simulation in an educational environment.
    

Social benefits

Editing Wikipedia means contributing to a common good that can be of benefit to many people and requires only an Internet connection. In a global social environment with great difficulties for freely accessing knowledge – due to technological, legal or economic restrictions – Wikipedia is a clear commitment to free and open access to knowledge of all kinds. Moreover, it has become an extremely important public channel of science communication and it is essential that scientists or academics themselves become more involved in improving its contents.