Tool-supported Assessment of Wiki-based Assignments

Integrating wiki-based activities into education encourages development of students’ competencies that are important for their future professional life. As wikis support social learning and interaction, when working with them students learn to cooperate, plan and organize collaborative tasks, create concepts, express ideas, etc. Many teachers recognize undeniable benefits of a wiki in learning and try to involve it in their teaching. Since wikis were developed for collaborative work but not for use in education, they typically do not include proper tools for tracking and assessing the students’ activities, which makes the evaluation difficult for the teacher. In this paper we present a tracking and assessment tool, which we have proposed and developed and report on our experience with evaluation of wiki-based assignments using this tool as well. Since the evaluation of wiki-based assignments is a nontrivial problem not only from the technical point of view but also from the point of methodology, the assessment methodology is also discussed here.