Collaboratively Developing Open Educational Resources for Engineering Educators in SlideWiki

Abstract

This paper reports on a study that was conducted to explore the potential of SlideWiki for collaborative content creation in a teacher education context. SlideWiki is a newly developed platform built on the Open Educational Re-sources (OER) ethos aiming to facilitate the collaboration around educational con-tent. In this study, 134 students (pre-service engineering educators) used SlideWiki to collaboratively develop OERs in the form of WebQuests. Students’ answers to a survey questionnaire were used to address their experience, while real interaction data from the SlideWiki platform were used to determine students’ participation in SlideWiki during the development of OERs both as individuals and as groups. The study yielded positive findings regarding students’ perceptions of the potential of SlideWiki to serve as an effective tool for collaboratively developing OERs and of its usefulness and effectiveness for supporting communities of educators. Also, assuming their future role as educators, students ex-pressed their intention to utilize SlideWiki in their practice. However, a discrepancy was noticed between students’ perceptions and their actual participation in SlideWiki (e.g. unequal distribution of workload among group members) that may be due to students’ lack of collaborative skills that need to be further cultivated.