Wiki acceptance by university students to improve collaboration in higher education

Abstract

Web 2.0 technologies, such as wikis, can play a key role in promoting interaction, delivering education and providing communication between students. However, most of the existing literature does not seem to consider relationships between designing wiki-based learning activities and the student acceptance of this technology. The purpose of the study was to investigate the acceptance of students when making use of wikis in an undergraduate course at a university in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. The study made use of a quantitative approach whereby an online questionnaire was distributed to 113 students involved in an undergraduate course. A forty per cent response rate was recorded while data were analysed making use of descriptive and inferential statistics. The study found that the majority of the students did experience the wiki as useful to improve collaboration in the course, however, there are fears about content being vandalised and plagiarised. Therefore, students will not voluntarily make use of the wiki despite the numerous advantages the technology can offer. The study recommends that students should be educated on the potential benefits of a wiki to improve collaboration before it is implemented in order to positively impact the perceptions and use by the students.

Keywords:

• Web 2.0
• wiki
• higher education institution
• collaborative learning