by Rebecca Borowski, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, WWU
Getting bored with Discussion boards? Consider having students post to a wiki! A wiki is a website that can be edited by multiple users. Rather than discussion boards, where students reply directly to each other and conversations happen in small groups or threads, a wiki page shows all of the posts and comments on one main page.
For example, perhaps you want students to find an example of a graph and share it with the class for everyone to analyze and discuss. Rather than having students submit their graph to you via an assignment or post it to a discussion board, have students add it to an “Examples of Graphs” page. In addition to posting their graph, ask students to post 2-3 sentences about why they selected it or what they think is meaningful about it. Once everyone has posted, you can respond with your own feedback, or invite students to post feedback on each other’s graphs. Rather than being embedded in multiple threads, all of the work is displayed on this one page, almost as if it was written on the white board in your face-to-face classroom.
To set up a wiki page, create a new page in Canvas and select “teachers and students” to answer the question about who can edit the page. Then build questions/opportunities for posting onto the page, and let students add their work!
Learning how to use wikis can be labor intensive at first, but once they get the hang of it, the benefits are plentiful. Take a look at the attachments to see the directions I give students when they are learning to post to wiki pages within Canvas.
One caution: If multiple students are editing the page at the same time, some of the work may be “overwritten.” For the reason, I encourage students to compose their posts in a word document first, then just copy and paste their work into the Canvas page for a quick post.
For assistance with Canvas, see: Canvas Help at WWU.